Technique Check - Roasting Garlic

I roasted three garlic heads today in preparation for the Spinach Marinara Lasagna, which will be the subject of an upcoming post (but which I'll tell you know involves THREE POUNDS OF TOFU, just to whet your appetite). Anyway, T&I suggest the roasted garlic variation for the marinara sauce, so I figured this was as good a chance as any to check their garlic-roasting technique.

If you haven't ever had roasted garlic, you should. Roasting it softens the cloves, and mellows the flavor out to a nice, soft sweetness. I had actually never roasted garlic before, but I did crosscheck the Veganomicon against Bittman just to see how much of a difference there was. I can report that the principle is the same, but that the Veganomicon's method is simpler.

Bittman is a little clearer, though. You start off by slicing the top off a head of garlic. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who actually wasn't completely certain which end was the top. Bittman tells you it's the pointy end...T&I assume you know this.

Then you pour just a little olive oil over the garlic head, and wrap it in aluminum foil.

You roast it by putting the little foil packets in the oven at 375 for 25-30 minutes. Just put them straight on the grates -- they'll be fine. The garlic gets super-fragrant before it's done, filling the kitchen with garlicky goodness.

Pull it out of the oven, and let it cool down till you can handle it. The cloves pop out of their skins easily, and they're soft and ready to spread on bread (like buttah! or margarine, whatever), throw into some hummus, or mix into a marinara sauce that has a hot date with THREE POUNDS OF TOFU. Did I mention the nutritional yeast in the lasagna? Mmmm.

Snacktime Special: Hummus and Mediterranean Style Cashew-Cucumber Dip

Happy New Year everyone! Things kind of got away from me in December, so even though I actually have been continuing the project, I haven't been super-diligent about updating. But let's just say that I have a little inspiration to be a bit more serious here, because the financial crisis basically ruined any semblance of a fitness routine, and I've put on a little weight. Ok, enough weight that my pants only barely fit. And while I'm aware that some of the recipes in this book are a wee bit heavy on the olive oil (or, egads! margarine) and hence may not be quite the thing for weight loss, I suspect diligent and careful incorporation of vegan cooking (along with a return to the gym, recently begun), can help my clothes feel comfortable again.

But before we get all low-fat up in here, let's have a snack. Maybe two.

First, does anybody not already know how to make hummus? I guess you need a recipe if you're writing the ultimate vegan cookbook, and Terry and Isa tacitly acknowledge this by titling theirs "A Hummus Recipe". There's nothing particularly unusual about it -- chickpeas, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, etc. Throw it all in a blender, and you've got hummus.


A couple additions I made -- a dash of cayenne to give it just a little bite, and a drop or two of soy sauce, which is completely inauthentic but contributes a nice smoky flavor. Also, it makes a lot of sense to cook the chickpeas yourself (which T&I suggest). I hadn't used canned chickpeas for a while, and this hummus, while good enough, had a decidedly metallic tang.

Onward to the next recipe -- Mediterranean Style Cashew-Cucumber Dip (page 66). This purports to be similar to tzatziki sauce, and there's a reminiscence, I guess. In any case, my notes on buying cashews still apply.


You start by peeling and seeding a couple cucumbers, then grating them. Squeeze as much water as you can out of them. Combine half the cucumber with some cashews, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt, and white pepper in a blender, and puree it till smooth (this may require the addition of a bit more lemon juice or olive oil). Scoop it out, and add the other half of the cucumber and some dill.

Then you're ready for a presentation like this.


There's nothing revelatory about these recipes, but they're satisfying, and they make enough that I took them to work with some pita bread for lunch a couple days. The hummus is a no-brainer, obviously, but the cashew-based recipe is a clever concoction. It doesn't taste even a little like yogurt, really, but it's creamy and satisfying on its own.

Bonus Recipe! Stir Fried Sweet Potatoes

Alongside the Hot Sauce-Glazed Tempeh, I served some boiled kale and stir-fried sweet potatoes. I thought I'd share the sweet potato recipe with you. It's of my own creation, but is inspired by a recipe in the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook (which is simultaneously hopelessly out of date and quite strong on technique).

Here's what you need:

1 lb sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into large dice
1/2 cup vegetable stock or water
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon minced ginger


1. Parcook the potatoes in boiling water for 10 minutes or so, until soft but not too much so.

2. Meanwhile, mix the stock, soy sauce, and sugar together.

3. Heat the oil in a wok or large skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add salt, then ginger, and stir-fry until the ginger just starts to release its fragrance, 30-45 seconds.

4. Add the sweet potatoes and stir until coated with oil.

5. Add the stock/soy sauce mixture and stir. Reduce heat to medium, cover, and let cook until most of the liquid has evaporated and sweet potatoes are tender.

6. Serve, accept compliments with grace.

Hot Sauce Glazed Tempeh

I have never understood the appeal of tempeh.

Tofu, I get and I like. It can be creamy or chewy, and absorbs damn near any flavor you put near it. Tempeh, on the other hand, reminds me a bit of a Duraflame log. Only made of fermented soybeans and a lot less flammable. For the record, I have cooked with tempeh before, and haven't managed to find the recipe to convert me.

But vegans seem to like tempeh, and the Hot Sauce-Glazed Tempeh (p. 129-130), which meets my pro-spicy sensibilities and was endorsed by the omnivorous Nadine at Culinate, seemed like a decent recipe to get going with.

So here's the method. You cut your package of tempeh into eight wedges, then simmer it in hot water for 10 minutes. This turns out to be an interesting step, because the tempeh expands pretty dramatically. Terry & Isa say that boiling it helps make the tempeh more receptive to receive the marinade.

Sounds kind of sexy.

Anyway, the marinade is made up of hot sauce, wine, olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, oregano, and cayenne. On that last one, Terry and Isa say, "we know, with hot sauce? Yes." They're right, and let's pause for a minute and consider why. It's easy to think that the only flavor peppers impart is heat, but if you think about it, you'll know that's not right. You can think of bell peppers as super-mild hot peppers, and you know that green bell peppers and red bell peppers taste different. Granted, those are the same species of pepper at different stages of ripeness, but that should get the point across. Once you get beyond the heat, different types of peppers taste, well, different. So -- the dominant flavors of Cholula are hot, vinegar, and salt. For 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne, it's not really adding heat in competition with 1/4 cup of hot sauce, and it's not adding acid or salt, either. It's just giving you a piquancy that the Cholula leeches out of its peppers. If you're using sriracha, your results may vary, but I'm pretty sure Terry & Isa are referring to your standard vinegar-based sauces.

Whatever. Just use the cayenne. Anyway, so you let all this crap marinate for an hour.


It was far too cold to grill, so I chose the pan-frying method You just add a bit of oil to a hot pan, then put the tempeh wedges in, turning it frequently and spooning the marinade over it to keep it from drying out. This method seems to work pretty well.

So finally, I pulled this off and served it alongside some boiled kale and stir-fried sweet potatoes (bonus recipe!).

Pretty, but a little spare. The verdict around the table was, frankly, mixed. Iv thought it was unbearably salty. E. thought it was crazy spicy, but he's a wimp. I liked it. But I also agreed with Iv that the salt was insane, but at the same time, the marinade actually brought out what's good about tempeh for me for the first time. Bittman refers to it as having a "haunting" flavor, and I've never gotten what he's talking about, but having the marinade acting as an extreme contrast brings it out. The marinade doesn't totally penetrate the tempeh, so the exterior is spicy, while the interior has an almost creamy, mild nutty flavor. It's nice.

But we've got to deal with the salt. It's the heat that brings out the contrast, not the salt. So the better way might be to take a look at some of the recipes for homemade Tabasco that you can find online and use one of them as the base for your marinade. A project for another time. For now, I recommend this recipe, with the reservation that you make your own hot sauce, or at least seek out a low-salt alternative.

Thanksgiving post mortem

Thanksgiving is not an even remotely vegan affair for my family.  Which is fine, since I'm not even vegetarian.  Amazingly, though, besides the turkey, the star of our Thanksgiving dinner is the consolation prize I always made back when I was vegetarian, and have continued making ever since.  Matar paneer (homemade cheese cooked with tomatoes and peas) has become a family tradition, to the point that my cousins who weren't able to come this year asked for my recipe (for the record, I use Julie Sahni's, with a few alterations borrowed from Lord Krishna).  Searching the vegan blogosphere, by the way, I find that most people seem to have success subbing tofu for the cheese, or you can try this vegan paneer recipe, whose quality I can't vouch for.

This is all an aside before getting to Friday night, when Iv and I were over at my aunt's house with a number of other relatives, and I noticed that my aunt owns both the Veganomicon and Vegan with a Vengeance.  So my aunt and I spent much of the evening discussing vegan cooking over a plate of my uncle's unbelievably melt-in-your-mouth ribs.

Vegan readers may see my description of this as smirking irony at best and outright offensive at worst, but I'd call this progress.  The fact of the matter is that I do not agree with the idea that eating animals, much less drinking milk or eating honey, is immoral (though this article should give us all pause).  But what my aunt and I do agree on is that eating less of these things -- whether for health, solving world hunger, environmental or humane reasons, or just for fun and variety -- is a good and necessary thing.

So, I think vegans and vegetarians alike should be encouraged that even though not many of us omnivores are considering giving up animal products, some of us are taking your arguments and your cooking seriously.  And whether those conversations are taking place over a conversation of ribs or ribz, I think that's a good thing.

Spaghetti & Beanball Update

I returned to the spaghetti and beanballs this evening, this time using pinto beans instead of chickpeas. I ran into some problems, though. The recipe said you want to start with about 3 cups of beans, which prompted me to use two 15-oz cans because the can said each can yields 3.5 1/2 cup servings. So I stuck with the rest of the recipe, with two minor exceptions. I added a little bit of minced onion (a follow-up on my idea from last time), and again, we still don't have any steak sauce, so I used ketchup in place of that.

But here's the problem. I think 3 cups is the wrong starting number, because the beanballs completely fell apart on me. The problem? 1/4 cup of wheat gluten is too little to seitanize three cups of beans.

The good news is that the beanballs taste much better with pinto beans than chickpeas. And I also chopped up some of the roasted bell peppers we had in the freezer and threw them in the sauce, which gave a nice, smoky flavor.

Mixed results, all in all. But I think I should have either halved the beans or doubled the wheat gluten.

Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping

Straight up now tell me

Will you cashew me forever?

Oh oh oh

Or is this tofu gonna run?

Straight up now tell me

Can garlic and basil together

Oh oh oh

Make a ricotta approximation?

I regret to inform you that the Amish CSA is taking a few months off as a theme for the blog, as we recently received our last shipment of vegetables. In it were a couple of acorn squash.

I am generally unfamiliar with the squash genre of vegetables. I grew up detesting zuchinni and yellow squash -- texture violation issues, generally -- I still prefer them a bit firm. But finally I came around, and have been cooking with summer squashes regularly. I'm still generally a bit unsteady with winter squash.

But here we had these acorn squash, sitting nice and pretty on the counter, and we had to do something with them. Enter the Pumpkin Baked Ziti with Caramelized Onions and Sage Crumb Topping (p. 194). I decided to substitute the acorn squash for the pumpkin.

But before we get to that, let's talk about one of the components of this dish: the Cashew Ricotta (p. 206). First, if you try this dish, you will be making it a lot. Which means you may need a supply of cashews. And for all y'all budget-conscious vegans who shop at Ye Olde Natural Foods Warehouse, the prospect of buying cashews may fill you with dread. But fear not! Your local Indian grocer is your friend! I bought 3 pounds of cashews at International Bazaar on Lafayette Road for $12! Remember, you're not looking for whole cashews because you're just buying them to grind up to make awesome fake ricotta anyway, so don't pay more than you have to...bits and pieces are fine.

This facsimile of ricotta cheese is made of cashews, tofu, garlic, basil, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. You just throw it all in a blender, and voila! ricotta-like goo. And I have to tell you, this is the first recipe that Iv and I have licked off the spatula. This is some mighty fine stuff.

So onto the rest. I made Iv peel the acorn squash for me because it was a major pain and he's good at that kind of stuff. Though not without swearing. The skin on this sucker is tough. Anyway, he ultimately triumphed, and I finally cut them in half.

And then cut them into little cubes, tossed them with a bit of olive oil, and roasted them at 400 for 20 minutes until they caramelized a bit. They should look like this when they're done.

So once this is done, you mash the roasted squash with a potato masher, then mix it with the cashew ricotta and the onions you've been caramelizing over low-medium heat while all the rest of this excitement has been going on. Then you mix it all up with some cooked ziti, and lay it out in a greased casserole dish.

Then, you create the bread crumb topping. Now, I have to tell you, this recipe calls for margarine. But I am here to say that you don't have to use it. Here's what I did. For breadcrumbs, I bought 3 multi-grain rolls at Kroger, tore them into bits, and ran them through the food processor. I did the same thing with the walnuts.

Then I just mixed the bread crumbs and walnuts with the herbs and fried them in the equivalent amount of olive oil and let them cook until the breadcrumbs were nice and crispy.

Seriously, folks, you don't need margarine for this.

Finally, you just layer the breadcrumbs over the rest of the casserole, then stick it in the oven, and wait for the goodness to emerge.

And oh man, is this good. It's garlicky, salty, and sweet from the squash, with a nice sagey crunch from the breadcrumbs. If you didn't know this was vegan, you wouldn't know this was vegan -- though you might wonder a little bit about why it doesn't hold together as well as baked ziti usually does. But whatever. It's moist and delicious and so on. Make this. It's very good. And it's awesome the next day, too. Iv took some for lunch, where he was brown-bagging with one of his coworkers, and was moved to pity him for his wretched peanut butter sandwich. Yes, this recipe has the power to move you to condescend to your less fortunate friends. All bow to the Pumpkin Baked Ziti!