MUSHROOM TOAST.

What has been happening!!

Well, for one thing, John was a nice boy and made me nice snackins the other night. We present: MUSHROOM TOAST.

Oh man, I love mushroom toast. I love sitting on the counter watching a nice boy make the mushroom toast for me even more. Actually, I just love the nice boy even Even more. But still! MUSHROOM TOAST.

Mushroom toast.

butter/olive oil
garlic
mushrooms
sourdough/other good bread
salt, pepper, fresh herbs if you want them

Melt some butter in a saute pan on medium-low while you smash a bunch of garlic cloves with the flat of your knife. Remove the skins, leaving the cloves whole. You can use as much garlic as you want; I love garlic, so we used a good six at least.

Toss all your garlic into the pan, stir to distribute oil, and let it cook for five minutes or so. You want the garlic to soften and sweeten, so keep the heat just shy of medium. You can also put the lid on the pan, so they cook from the top down as well as the bottom up.

Now get out some mushrooms and cut them into thick slices. You can clearly use any kind of mushroom you like; we had some big white farmer's market dudes, clearly intended for stuffing. They didn't get stuffed, though; they got sliced. I have no idea how many we used. Maybe three big mushrooms? Something like that.

Throw all your mushrooms into the pan, adding more butter if you need it. At this point you can turn the heat up a bit, since the mushrooms (being fungus) will start to bleed off juice. Yay juice! Cook together, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are cooked through and their juices have reduced a bit. Put the lid back on the pan so the liquid doesn't totally evaporate. Salt; pepper.

As the mushrooms are finishing, toast some decent bread to your required specifications. I usually like my toast barely golden, but a darker, crispier toast will stand up to the juicy juicy mushrooms better. Sourdough is awesome here, but any bread you like should work.

When everything is done, put your toast on a plate and add a big pile of mushrooms and juice. Snip some fresh herbs over it if you have fresh herbs and are up for that kind of thing. We've been all excited about the sage plant, so I had my mushroom toast with bits of sage.

Eat it!

Depending on how quickly you eat, the thickness of your bread, the crispiness of your toast, and the juiciness of your mushrooms, you may need to use a fork instead of just picking up the toast and chowing down. That's ok! Eating utensils for life!

Spanish tortilla!

Man, what is with me and the eggs lately? Constant eggs! I'm in that part of the phase where I still love eggs and want them, but am starting to feel like it's too much. Time to break out the spring vegetables instead.

In the meantime, I totally made and ate a 3-egg tortilla the other night. I wanted tapas; this worked fine.

Spanish tortillas are so good! The egg here really should be only a binding agent for lots of delicious potatoes, plus any other addenda you like. I wanted zucchini, so I added some of that. Then everything worked together in perfect harmony, and I ate my tortilla and went to bed.

That said, it's 3 eggs and butter and oil and it's a good thing it's been a year and a half since the last time I had one.

Tortilla with potato and zucchini

butter/olive oil
onion
potatoes
zucchini
eggs
salt, pepper, paprika

Warm some olive oil on medium in a small nonstick frying pan. Chop up a yellow onion and throw it into the oil to start softening. Scrub and dice a couple of potatoes. I used one yukon gold and one redskin, which turned out fine for just me; use more if you are feeding more than one person.

Add the potatoes to the onions, stir, and cook to brown on all sides. Potatoes can suck up a lot of oil, so watch it and add some if you need to. Otherwise, just keep shaking the pan and flipping potato bits every couple minutes until they are nice and crispy and clearly awesome. When they're done, tip them all out into a bowl and set them aside for a minute.

Dice up a zucchini, add it to the hot pan, and do the same with it. You want roughly as much zucchini as potato, or maybe a little less. Crispy zucchini bits!

Now you can dump the potato and onion mix back into the pan with the zucchini. Mix it all up and make sure everything is hot through.

Crack a couple eggs into a bowl, beat them with a fork, season them with salt, pepper, and paprika, and pour them over the zucchini and potato. Tilt the pan to get egg good and everywhere; it should run down between the vegetables to cover them. When two eggs turned out not to be enough to cover my pan, I just beat and added another one. Flexible!

Cook, shaking the pan and running a silicon or wooden spatula around the edge, until the eggs are partly set and the whole creation is fully loose from the bottom of the pan. This should take maybe three or four minutes.

Now we get to flip the tortilla. This can be intimidating, but don't worry! You can do it!

First, get out a plate the same size or larger than your pan. Use your spatula to coax the entire tortilla out of the pan and onto your plate. Hold the plate on the palm of one hand and pick up the pan in the other. Then flip the frying pan directly over the plated tortilla.

Holding the pan and plate firmly together, carefully flip them over. Remove the plate; the tortilla should have fallen into the pan upside down. Put the pan back over the heat and cook to set the eggs on the other side, maybe two minutes.


Then coax the whole business out of the pan again, cut it into substantial sixths, and eat it.

A tortilla really wants to be eaten with a massive salad, which in my case I had not got. Instead I had it with sour cream, for ultimate dairy explosion. I did have the also requisite red wine, however: malbec.

This whole experience was way too rich, so I ended up only having 2/3 a tortilla for dinner. The other two sixths I ate cold for breakfast the next day. This works admirably well. Tapas! Tapas for breakfast! I mean, I didn't get any tapenade to go with it, but I can deal with that.

Experimentation for the win

Last week I spontaneously had a day off work, so I decided I was going to have the most awesome lunch ever: tempeh and greens.

Normally when I marinate tempeh I end up getting it too salty, which is clearly due to using too much soy sauce. I don't even like soy sauce that much. So I started looking around the kitchen to figure out a better marinade base, and came up with tahini. I love tahini! So I mixed up a marinade a lot like Jo Stockton's tahini sauce. I'd liked it as a straightup sauce with soba; as a marinade, with cooked component, it's possibly even better.

Chard is the best because it has two separate edible components: stems and leaves. The stems are all crunchy yet soft, soaking up liquid like bok choy, and the leaves are intense and green-flavored and delicious. You have to love a vegetable that gives you two completely different experiences like that. The secret is to separate them out, since they need to cook for different times. Chard!

Tahini tempeh with chard

tahini
soy sauce
white wine vinegar/other vinegar
olive/tasteless oil
sriracha/other hot pepper sauce
water
fresh ginger
garlic
tempeh
brown short-grain rice/other grain
a bunch of chard/similar greens
salt, pepper

Marinate tempeh, make rice, sear tempeh, add chard.

For marinade, I mixed up a big spoonful of tahini, a few small splashes of soy sauce, vinegar, and olive oil, and a substantial squirt of sriracha, then thinned everything down with some water. Cut a big slice or two of ginger and add it to the marinade; smash and peel a big clove or garlic and add that too. I never measure any of this stuff, so just play it by ear.

Cube up a bunch of tempeh and throw it into the marinade to soak up all the delicious, delicious business. I used half a brick of tempeh, since I was only going to feed myself. Marinate for an hour or so, longer if you want. I think tempeh can get soggy if you marinate it too long, though, so I wouldn't leave it soaking overnight.

When the tempeh is nearly done marinating, throw some rice and water in the rice cooker (or, you know, a pot) and cook it. You could sub pretty much any grain in place of the rice, so use whatever you have lying around. I like the chewiness of the rice here, so I'd probably stick to something in the barley/wheat family, but things like quinoa and millet should be fine too.

To sear your tempeh, heat up a saute pan to medium-high. Add a little bit of oil, spread it around the pan, and add your drained tempeh in one layer. (Keep the marinade to one side for later.) Cook, shaking the pan and flipping every few minutes, until your tempeh is happy and browned and sizzling all over.

While the tempeh is cooking, wash your chard. I used an entire bunch for just me, because 1. greens reduce and 2. I like chard. Remove the stems from the leaves, and chop each into small pieces. You can throw your stems into the marinade to pick up some of that flavor, if you feel like it.

When tempeh is fully seared, turn the heat down to medium, then add the chard stems and a generous splash of marinade to the pan. Maybe add a touch of salt and pepper here as well. Stir it around to cook the stems for two or three minutes.

Then add the greens and a little more marinade (I just threw all of mine in, minus the ginger and garlic), stir the business up, and slap on a lid. Let everything steam together for a minute or so, or until the greens are fully wilted.

You are done! Fill a big bowl with rice, tempeh, and chard, grind some pepper over it, and eat it hard.

Hooray, lunch!

Greatest breakfast ever.

Ok, so the other day John and I made a huge pile of linguine with spicy aglio e olio: smashed whole cloves of garlic cooked in olive oil with minced jalapeño, red pepper flakes, and sweet green pepper, plus a little parmesan and a lot of fresh black pepper. It was awesome.

The problem with having that pasta with those vegetables, though, was that they didn't really stick to each other. Linguine doesn't have a bunch of crevices to catch all the delicious business, even though it can certainly hold onto the spicy oil! Yes! So while everything was great, and we certainly ate a lot of the little bits by straight up stabbing them with forks, we also ended up with a smallish pile of vegetables left over. What do you do with a saucer full of garlic and hot pepper?

Well, if you are me, you make some of this.

Perfect egg sandwich.

butter/olive oil
leftover spicy veg (or fresh veg)
eggs/firm tofu
salt, pepper
sourdough/other good bread
mozzarella or swiss cheese, if you want cheese
mesclun mix/other good lettuce

Warm veg; scramble eggs; toast bread; slap sandwich together.

So get out a (pref. nonstick) saute pan, heat it on medium, and melt a little butter in it. You don't need a lot when working with this type of leftover veg, since they were cooked in olive oil to begin with. Just tip your veg into the pan and heat them up, stirring occasionally. If you want to start from fresh vegetables, use a little more butter or oil. Then you can smash some garlic cloves, cut up whatever veg you want in your eggs, cook them until they're softened and any juice has evaporated, and proceed. Besides my mix, I'd use red pepper, mushrooms, or any kind of greens.

When the vegetables are hot through and sizzling, crack an egg or two into a bowl. I'm thinking you could also use crumbled firm tofu here, although I haven't tried it; it's just a scramble.

Salt and pepper the eggs, beat them with a fork, and pour them into the pan. Turn down the heat a little, so you can cook the eggs slowly. Now get out your spatula and start stirring. Stir more or less continually until your eggs are cooked to your liking. On low-medium heat, with hot vegetables, this should take about five minutes.

When your eggs are almost done, stick a couple slices of bread in the toaster oven (or I guess actual toaster) and toast to your liking. I used sourdough, because sourdough is awesome, but other breads would work: serious grain breads, or aromatic rye. Just use good bread instead of white diner crud. Try to time your toasting so the bread will be done at the same time as the eggs.

Ready to assemble? Cut a few thin pieces of cheese (if you want cheese) and lay them across each piece of bread. Scoop your eggs over the bread, add a big handful of greens (and maybe some parsley if you have a bunch lying around), and close your sandwich. Mash it together gently for a minute, so the hot eggs and bread can melt the cheese and give the sandwich some means to stay together. I used way too much egg for my amount of bread, so I had bits and pieces falling all over the place. Be prepared: get out a napkin.

Now eat it! Immediately! Eggs must be eaten hot.

Have a big cup of tea or preferably (if it's nighttime, or the weekend) some dry white wine. Don't make it into a mimosa, either. You remember that bit in Sandman where Dream and Delirium were having dinner, and Dream had an omelet with a glass of white wine? This is a lot like that.

GREATEST BREAKFAST EVER!

SEITAN!

So yeah. I seem to have forgotten to tell you guys that a couple weeks ago we made our first great foray into the land of seitan. For starters, I totally broke the girl at the food co-op's head during our conversation about my big bag of gluten. Once we'd exhausted the "you can make fake meat??" topic, she asked, "so how long have you been vegan?" Well, I'm not vegan; I just like making and eating all kinds of food. She had no idea where to go after that. Come on! It's not impossible for me to like eating vegan, even if I'm not vegan. People do not have to fit into one category!

We used the recipe o'greatness from the PPK forums, and it worked admirably. The only change I remember was in using fresh chopped garlic instead of garlic powder, and upping the soy since we never have anything approaching worcestershire sauce at our house. The outcome, though, was a total success. Easy! Sliceable! Pleasantly sproingy to knead!

Now the only problem is figuring out what to do with it. Perhaps a bunch of fake pepperoni for my cheater pizza? Ok.

Seitan pepperoni

seitan
olive/tasteless oil
red pepper flakes/other seasoning agent

Cut your seitan into thin slices, such that it approximates pepperoni. Heat a big splash of oil in a flying pan on medium-high. As it's heating, season the oil copiously with red pepper flakes. Lay your seitan slices in the pan and cook, turning to get each side golden brown. Adjust heat as necessary so nothing burns. When your seitan pieces are toasty all over, you're pretty much done. Drain off the excess oil on paper towels.

Cheater pizza

pita bread of your choice
olive oil
tomato sauce/etc
mushrooms, green pepper, shallot: whatever
seitan pepperoni
cheese if you want it
basil, oregano, salt

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Lay out your pitas on a baking sheet. Smear them lightly with olive oil, then add tomato sauce, a little salt, and anything you like on pizza. I made a really traditional pizza, with lots of chopped mushrooms, green pepper, thin shallot slices, and mozzarella. I also cut my seitan slices into little squares before adding them. Finish the pizza with appropriate herbs: basil and oregano in my case.

Bake for about fifteen minutes, rotating the pan as needed, until your pizzas are hot and crispy and any cheese you used is starting to brown.

Cut into pieces and eat voluminously!

Man, writing this made me so hungry that I now have another batch of four cheater pizzas in the oven: potato/garlic/sage, tomato/spinach/mushroom/mozz, balsamic dressinged mushrooms/more spinach/parmesan, and a tomato/spinach/garlic/mozz one for John. PIZZA.