Gardenburgers

Tonight: Gardenburgers, mac & cheese (soy), dill pickles, and roasted kale.

Tomorrow: Gardenburgers, cole slaw, baked beans, mac & cheese, and dill pickles.

Remind me that I like Gardenburgers brand veggie burgers better than Amy's or Boca or Sunshine. Gardenburgers are sweet and mustardy.

(I didn't take that picture, it's from Google.)

Cranberries popping, Field Roast, Thanksgiving.

I am Thanksgiving. I made cheer. I seized power. I created cranberry sauce, and it tastes and looks and feels exactly like cranberry sauce.

It was very easy to make. I had, let's see, probably about a half-pound of cranberries (fresh cranberries from the co-op). A little bit of orange juice. An apple (Golden Delicious, from the co-op). Sugar. Nutmeg. Cloves.

You heat the cranberries in a pan (cast-iron skillet in my case).


When they start to pop (literally, you will hear them pop and see them splitting - watch....),

add sugar (you will need a lot, so just add some and then as it's cooking, keep tasting and adding more if needed), nutmeg (a little), a few cloves, the apple - diced very small (I used 3/4 of the apple), and splash on some orange juice (I used a very small amount of orange juice; just remember what consistency you want to end up with, kind of gelatinous; you will also probably add more orange juice little by little as it cooks).




Once the cranberries have started to pop, you don't want to cook them any longer than 15 minutes, or the pectin will break down in a bad way and it won't set properly. So add these ingredients, stir it up, start tasting the juices and adding sugar as needed, add a little more orange juice now and then if it's dry and it hasn't cooked for about 15 minutes yet.



When it's sweet and the apples and cranberries are soft and it's getting a little gelatinous, turn off the heat, put foil over the pan and let it sit in the steam and the fruit will continue to soften and the gel will firm up a little. Then you can put it in a bowl and put it in the fridge if you want to serve it cold. Make sure you taste it as it is cooking, so you get it the right sweetness. After you set the cranberry sauce aside, heat up some leftover vegan Field Roast, potatoes, sweet potatoes and asparagus, and throw it on a plate with your homemade cranberry sauce and some apple sauce. Mashed potatoes and gravy would also be a great option. Sweet corn. Green bean casserole. Pumpkin pie. I had a brownie for dessert. :)


Does it look perfect?! And it tastes perfect, refreshing, sweet but not too sweet, gelatinous, the whole nine yards. Wish I had more sweet potatoes, is all. Mmm, can't get over this cranberry sauce.

Boxing Day Comfort Food

After a decadent two-day winter feast, today is a noodle soup, fried potato, onion sandwich kind of day.

I need groceries.

No farmers' market Saturday for the holiday weekend. No farmers' market last Saturday because of the blizzard. Six days, and then I can buy brussels sprouts and celery root and kale and apples and potatoes and mushrooms and leeks and lentils and other good things.

But the winter hibernation has been good.
We went out for a Christmas Day feast at Su Xing House, and yesterday, feasted on leftovers.

We got two big platters to share. The first features a sweet, smoky sauce that you have to try to believe.

Crispy Soybean Steak with Chef's Special Sauce

See that sexy green vegetable there? I'm not sure what that is. I kind of think it's baby bok choy, but it doesn't say that on the menu. (Update: No. I Googled it and looked more closely - that's not baby bok choy, but I don't know what it is.) The menu calls it "sanhai green." I Googled that. No such mention. Is it a typo? Did they mean Shanghai? Is that bok choy? If you know, let me know. Whatever it was, it was full of flavor.

Chef's Specialty #10, "As You Wish" (bean curd wraps stuffed with braised mushrooms, with asparagus on the side)

The flavor of these wraps was delicious, but I wasn't wild about the chewy texture. Too much mushroom in one bite? That's hard for me to imagine, as one of my favorite dishes at Su Xing is the Mushroom Delight, but maybe the mushrooms combined with that bean curd wrap was too much for me. If you're not that influenced by texture, or if you don't mind foods with a springy, spongy, chewy texture, then I would recommend this. In fact, I can imagine myself having this again someday; that's just how good the flavor is. My other complaint, though, is that I need a sauce with it. No problem in this case, because we combined all the foods together and ate it with the unbelievably sweet, smoky, delicious sauce from the soybean steaks. The Soybean Steak Platter was a clear favorite at our table.


All of this was served with miso soup (shown above), plenty of brown rice, a plate of honeydew melon and pineapple, and of course hot tea.

Our bill came to $37.15 ($45 with tip), and we had enough leftovers for a whole meal the next day. Nothing like Chinese leftovers on Boxing Day.

Ready to go into the oven

Ready to eat

Happy hibernation, happy solstice, happy holidays. At a time of year when people tend to think of giving, sharing, refocusing, and changing, all more pointedly than usual, I encourage you to ask yourself if you can do something for the animals (including humans) and enjoy your future feasts with harm to none.

Thanksgiving Part II - "We were very tired, we were very merry"

We made our second Tofurkey of the season last night. This afternoon, we feasted on leftovers.

What you see here is the Tofurkey ready to go into the oven. Around it, you see red potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, onion (and there are whole cloves of garlic in there, too, you just don't see them.) It's basted with a mixture of olive oil, orange juice, soy sauce, and seasonings. With it, we had stuffing and homemade gravy. Mark made the gravy. The stuffing was from a mix. The gravy has mushrooms and I don't know what all.

Here's a plate of food from last night.

Notice that it's quite different from last week's early Thanksgiving meal.

Two different, similar meals, two different kinds of day. Last week, it was an earlier, lighter meal. This week, we ate late at night after spending a long time preparing the meal, after taking a long trip in the rain to get the roast because everyplace convenient was out of everything or closed. We were hungry and then we got very, very full. And it was good.

Here's the preparation of last night's feast. Please excuse the messy kitchen.

Thanksgiving Part I

We're doing this again next week. But Friday is a great night to treat ourselves to something ridiculous to eat, because grocery day is tomorrow and we're running out of things. If we're going to have pizza or Ethiopian food or soy sausage and tofu scrambles, it's going to happen on a Friday evening.

Today I went to the actual grocery store (where they have foods to buy indoors, inside a building with aisles and cash registers - gasp), and bought... drumroll... a Tofurkey roast! What comes with it is the roast stuffed with stuffing and wild rice, and a gravy mix. I also bought some cranberry sauce, and we roasted the Tofurkey with potatoes and carrots.

I can't believe I get to wake up tomorrow and sip coffee and chill out until 10:00 and then go to the farmers' market. I was there week before last because of missing my math class, but I was trying to figure out how to get to math class and it wasn't the same relaxing experience it usually is. I haven't had my old, normal Saturday morning routine since the Saturday before Halloween.

I still can't really believe summer is over. This was a great summer for us.

Looking forward to repeating tonight's meal next Thursday. Who knows, by then, we might even have a dining room table.