Before It Was Poop

I like booze so much that when I’m not drinking it, I want to be eating it.

Just kidding. Booze is great, though.

I really, really like pasta with vodka sauce. In most cases it is very fattening. Which is fine, but not good for everyday eatings. So I decided to make my own.

Ingredients!

6 oz. pasta (I used wheat pasta because that’s what I eat)

salt

1/2 Tbsp. olive oil

1/4 cup chopped onion

2 minced garlic cloves

a hearty shake of crushed red pepper flakes

a few fresh basil leaves

3 Tbsp. vodka (which is 1 1/2 oz, which is a jigger! jigger what?!)

14 oz. can of whole tomatoes, drained and diced

1/4 - 1/3 cup unsweetened non-dairy milk (I used almond, and closer to a 1/4 cup)

Directions!

Cook the pasta in salted water, and set aside. While it’s cooking, heat the olive oil in a saucepan or skillet. Cook the onion and garlic until soft. Add in the basil, pepper flakes and vodka. Cook for a couple of minutes. Add in the diced up tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Turn the heat down to low, cover the pan, and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in the milk. Season with salt and pepper. Mix the pasta with the sauce and serve!

It makes about three pretty huge servings.

So it makes a light and garlicy and spicy sauce. I had some asparagus and grape tomatoes hanging around, so I sauteed those and added them to the sauce. It’s not your regular indulgent vodka sauce, but it was pretty darn good. And looks pretty, too. The asparagus makes it look like Spring.

If you want it creamier, soy cream might work. I mean, as long as you don’t use the French vanilla stuff.

I’m submitting this post to the Presto Pasta Night roundup for this week!  There’s always yummy foods to look at there.

- Ellen

Hey, my mom reads this now. Hi mom!

For Mom’s Day I went to mom’s house and made pizza with her and her husband, Colin. If I had known, I would have brought some ingredients, but mom and Colin provided some so I went to work making a veggie pizza on the whole wheat crust they made from scratch. Wow was that good.

We also had a random assortment of veggies and some cheesy stuff on hand so I used that. So hey, here’s what I did.

Once the crust got flattened out I coated it in a layer of olive oil. Next came pizza sauce, minced garlic, diced onion, and some red pepper flakes. After that, sliced tomato, broccoli, and mushrooms, with some chunks of mozzarella and a sprinkling of cheese that comes pre-shredded in the stores.

It turned out pretty awesome and mom and Colin liked it which was really my goal here. Honestly, I used more cheese than I would have liked, but cheese is tasty and I didn’t want mom and Colin to think it was bland. So I used slices of mozzarella a la pizza margharita rather than just shredding a whole bunch and coating the top. It was still more cheese than I’d usually use, but I liked it.

I have to get the recipe for that pizza crust from my mom too. It was good.

-Bret

So, the first time that Bret and I met he brought me a batch of blueberry scones.  The recipe came from Vegan with a Vengeance.  Now, I’m sure sometime in my youth I was told not to accept foods from strangers, but he’s really not all that sketchy and I like scones a whole bunch.  He assured me that they weren’t poison.  I believed him.  So I ate the whole batch of scones, and they were mad tasty.  I was pretty sure that this cookbook was a good one to have.

I had a flip through Bret’s copy and found a bunch of recipes that I wanted to make.  One of the first recipes in the book is for a tofu frittata, which Bret has made and said was really good.  It sounded really good.

So I ordered my own copy, and the day it came I had to make something.    Well, I plan on making everything.  But because the frittata sounded awesome and had a good rating from Bret, I decided to go for it.

I checked the Post Punk Kitchen website to see if this is a recipe they’ve posted.  Since it’s not, I feel not right about copying it.  So I’ll talk about it a bit.

A frittata is a big open-faced omelet that you cook mostly in the oven, right?  Omelets have eggs, no?  Eggs are kind grody if you ask me.  And while this frittata looks like it has eggs in it, it doesn’t.  Nor does it really taste like eggs.  I don’t eat meat because I don’t really like the taste of it, so I’m not really one to try to make things taste like things that I’d rather not eat (I’ll eat a veggie burger or a veggie dog or whatever, not because I want something that tastes like a hamburger or hotdog, but because I like the way veggie burgers and dogs taste.  Or whatever).

So, this tastes like tasty.  It’s a mix of tofu, nutritional yeast, sun dried tomatoes, onions, asparagus and seasonings to make it taste wonderful.

I don’t own a cast iron skillet, or any kind of oven-proof pan, so I had to bake it in a pie plate.  And that’s just fine, but I think it would have gotten more brown and set up a little nicer if I had one.  I’m in the market for some cast iron, for sure.

I cooked this right before I had to go out on Friday night, so I didn’t even get to try any when it was straight out of the oven.  I had some cold and I had some reheated, and I have to say this tastes wonderful cold or room temperature.  But I’m going to make another one and try it freshly cooked and warm.  There are a few variations in the cookbook, and I think I may try the one with olives next.

I just had it with salad and the rest of Bret’s grandma’s beets (Bret should have his grandma blog about her beets), but hash browns would have gone way awesome with this.

-Ellen

Lydia was skeptical when I told her that raw tofu was edible. I managed to talk her into putting it into a cold salad with some tomatoes and snap peas and carrots, though the ultimate tasty of the salad came from Lydia’s dressing/marinade that she made. It had lemon juice, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, orange juice, and some sugar in it, and it was the best. She gave me the measurements which were like:

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon vinegar

1 teaspoon orange juice

2 teaspoons sugar

2 tablespoons soy sauce

I think. Then she marinaded the tofu in it. Good.

Oh and the pasta sauce was some tomatoes and some leftover pasta sauce and some peppers and garlic. And get this - almond butter. When Lydia and Brenna cook I get scared. It turned out tasty though. Their ways of cooking are just totally alien and strange to me. Every time I watch them cook my sanity fractures just a little.

But it’s always tasty.

-Bret

I had to try this recipe again. Mainly because it was awesome but also because I wanted to try a few things. One thing I didn’t get to try was cooking it with Thai chili peppers because Brenna was over for dinner and she’s a total wussface, and I also didn’t get to try any Thai basil because it wasn’t available at the grocery stores I checked. But I tried my new lemongrass tactics courtesy of Shreyas, and I tried green curry paste and some minced ginger. It turned out real great. Beyond the two lacking ingredients, the only thing I feel like this recipe missed was browning up the chickpeas before adding the coconut and the curry. But this one was mega tasty and might be close to perfect.

I felt guilty making it without Ellen around though. :/

-Bret

So, while I was visiting Bret, we tried to make enchiladas to celebrate an early Cinco de Mayo.  They were edible, but not something we were going to speak of again.

Still, I was determined to make something Cinco de Mayo-ish.  So I used my brains to come up with a rice and beans recipe.  My brains ended up making something that was a little more Caribbean than Tex-Mex, but it was still super tasty.

Rice Ingredients!

1 cup brown basmati rice

2 cups water

1/4 cup salsa

1 vegetable boullion cube

1/2 tsp turmeric

1 medium tomato

Rice Directions!

So mix everything except for the tomato in a pot and cook it until the rice is almost done.  At the last five minutes or so, chop up the tomato and add it in.  Set the rice aside.

Bean Salad Ingredients!

15oz. can of black beans, drained

juice from two limes

1 tsp. chili powder

1/2 tsp cumin

Bean Salad Directions!

Uh, mix everything up.  It’s probably best to let it sit in the fridge for a while to let the flavors mix, but I was hungry and ate it right away.

I mixed some pineapple with cilantro from my cilantro plant and had that with it.

After letting the salad sit for a few hours, the lime juice was a lot less jarring.  It made for a simple and quick dinner on a busy day.

If I make rice like this again I’m adding cayenne.  You might also want to add salt and pepper to it but I liked it without.

- Ellen

So way back when me and Ellen were first getting to know each other she said she wanted to go to the the Moosewood which is like a semi-famous vegetarian restaurant that makes a buttload of vegetarian cookbooks. It’s right in Ithaca which is where I live so I’ve eaten there a bunch, and as soon as Ellen expressed enthusiasm I was all over poo-pooing it!

“Yeah, Moosewood’s okay. It’s not great or anything.”

But I wanted her to make up her own mind so when she came to visit over the weekend it was on The Agenda with watching bad 80’s horror movies and playing Scrabble. We went for lunch because that’s when it’s cheapest. I really haven’t noticed a huge difference in the quality of the food between lunch and dinner, but there is a $5-$8 difference in price.

So I’m going to lay it all out on the table here. I usually think the Moosewood is way overrated and that their food is bland. I like their salad dressings and their desserts and I’ve had a few really good cocktails there too, but the entrees just don’t get me that excited which would be fine if the food was cheaper. But it’s not, so… yeah. When friends of mine visit from far away I say, “I can take you out to eat at the famous restaurant, or the good restaurant.” I’m being kind of harsh, here, but every time I go to the Moosewood I walk away wondering why I went there when I know better. Well, this time I went there because I wanted to see if Ellen liked it and thought I was crazy.

Hey this is what I ate:

It was some eggplant stuff. I can’t even remember the name anymore. It was eggplant and peppers and whatnot over polenta. It was pretty good. Ten bucks good? Ehh. Not really. But it did make me think that I need to do a lot more with polenta.

Pfft. Moosewood. But hey hanging out with Ellen was awesome.

-Bret

Bret’s not crazy.  Well, he is, but he’s not crazy for thinking that the Moosewood is kind of overrated.  The only things that really impressed me was Bret’s salad dressing.  Japanese carrot, I think?  I want the recipe.  Maybe it’s in one of their books.

So the Moosewood is kind of overrated.  Based on a one-meal experience.  I tasted Bret’s eggplant scallopine (that’s what it was called!) and I had a bowl of Caribbean black bean soup and the French rice salad.  Here’s what the salad looked like:

It was tasty.  There was rice and all kinds of fresh herbs mixed with a vinaigrette and topped with pine nuts.  The cheese added nothing, but I do like me some cheese so I ate it.  It just tasted like something I could make at home.  The black bean soup also tasted like something I could make at home (only if I made it myself it would have been a lot more spicy).  I’m all for food that tastes like it was home cooked, but it could have been a little more exciting for the price.  Maybe if they threw in a few magic tricks to entertain us while we waited for our food.

So it’s a good restaurant.  And I’m glad I got to go and make up my own mind instead of just listening to Bret be a big downer.  The presentation is nice and the food is quite tasty, but I don’t feel like I need to go back.  Except maybe to try the vegan chocolate cake.

Next time, we’re going to one of these so-called “good” restaurants.  And I’m paying!

- Ellen

So Friday night Brenna had a hankering for Aladdin’s and I had a hankering for pignolia. I haven’t had it in a long time but it’s this really tasty pasta that involves goat cheese, mushrooms, and pine nuts. It tends to be really, really salty though. I got it this time with lemon-pepper linguine and it was really good. The mushrooms are my favorite part of it. They’re marinaded in something and it makes them all full of yum. The cheese and the salt ended up doing me in, though, and made me a little sick but that’s because I don’t know when to stop eating. I ate the whole plate. Bad move, Bretster. Next time I need to show a litle restraint.

Oh and then we were waiting to pay for our check and apparently our server left and we sat there and sat there and sat there and then had to grab somebody. Oh! And we went on Slope Day which meant we were the only ones there who weren’t totally hammered. And then two guys in banana outfits walked by the window. Slope Day, in case you didn’t know which you probably didn’t, is Cornell’s pseudo-holiday where all the college students get totally hammered. On the drive there I saw two incredibly drunk guys carrying each other around. I was like, “What the eff? It’s like 5PM.” Then I remembered. “Oh. Slope Day.”

We didn’t see anybody puke anywhere but there were absurd conversations going around us. Most of them were, “Jason was SO TRASHED,” stories. One girl was talking about how weird it was that her friend wouldn’t have sex with boys, and at another table a girl’s cell phone kept ringing and she’d answer it and say loudly, several times, “I’m at ALADDIN’S.”

The end.

-Bret

Okay, I love Paula Deen.  Everything she cooks is filled with sticks and sticks of butter and other things that are very bad for you.  The gym I used to belong to would show the Food Network on some of their tvs and I totally watched Paula make pies while using the stairclimber.  But people complained and looking at pies while exercising became a big, fat memory.

I’ve never baked anything before that was vegan that didn’t come from a recipe that told me specifically that it was vegan and that the dairy/egg substitutions that it suggested would work and that it wasn’t going to taste totally gross.  Well, until now.  I wanted to try making something vegan all by myself and see how it would come out.  So I picked a Paula Deen recipe.  Something easy, that didn’t have a lot of ingredients.  I decided to make her Brown Sugar Chewies.

The only things I had to replace were half a stick of butter and an egg.  Easy-peasy.  For butter I used soy margarine.  For the egg, well, there are lots of choices.  I was going to use flax meal with water, but I decided that it might taste weird so I went with cornstarch and water instead.

 These bars are super quick to throw together, and I imagine they’d double well to make in a 9×13″ pan.

The ingredients!

1/4 cup non-dairy margarine

1 cup brown sugar

2 Tbsp. cornstarch mixed with 2 Tbsp. water

3/4 cup flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/4 cup chopped pecans

Directions!

I was really super organized when I made these.  Usually, I’m scrambling around looking for ingredients I’ve forgotten about, but I think it was just the fact that there’s hardly anything to these that just made it all flow.  Before I started anything, I mixed the cornstarch and the water in a little bowl and set it aside.  I also mixed the flour and the baking powder together in another bowl and set that aside too.  I got those things set and preheated my oven to 350F.

So put the butter in a pot and melt it on the stove.  Once it’s melted, add the brown sugar and stir until it’s all moistened.  Then add your cornstarch egg!  Mix that up all good.

Okay, mix in your flour and baking powder now, and stir it all up until everything’s nice and combined.  Last, stir in the vanilla and pecans.  So easy!

To bake it, I used a 8×8″ pan sprayed with cooking spray.  Or you could lightly oil it or use margarine or whatever you like to do.  Then I dumped in the batter and spread it out with my hands, because it was kind of sticky and a spatula wasn’t working.  My hands were clean.  I swear!

Put the pan in the oven and bake for 20 minutes.  Let cool, cut into bars, and devour.

To be honest, I didn’t wait until they were cool before I ate one.  When warm, they were crusty on top and ooey-gooey in the middle.  They tasted almost like a caramel brownie.  Once they were cooled, I think they tasted more like a caramel candy.  Not hard or chewy or anything, but they did have a very melty-in-the-mouth kind of consistency.

I took some to Bret and he ate five of them in under 24 hours, so I think maybe I was successful.  Now I feel more daring and am going to try something a little more challenging. 

- Ellen