A Very Crunk Weekend

When my cookbook, Cookin' Crunk, came out in September, I had a ton of local and regional events lined up — booksignings, cooking demos, a release party/tasting. But besides my recent "Keep On Crunkin'" social media campaign, the promo events have slowed down quite a bit.

But somehow, I wound up with three Cookin' Crunk-related events this past weekend! Whew! I stayed busy, but it was such fun. On Friday night, I went to a vegan/vegetarian food tasting at a local grab-and-go food place called Take Home Gourmet, and they let me bring along some books to sign.

Take Home Gourmet in Collierville sells fresh, homemade meals that are frozen in either single-size or family-size portions. Busy folks who don't have time to cook can stop in and pick up dinner on the way home.

Back when my book first came out, THG co-owner Jimmy read about it on Twitter. He sent me an email, letting me know that they were looking to expand their options for vegetarian and vegan customers, and he asked if I could act as a sort of vegan consultant since he and chef/co-owner John are meat eaters. Of course I said yes! I'll do anything to help ensure Memphis veg folks have more options. So I helped them brainstorm some ideas, and Jimmy's wife Jackie went to work in the kitchen. THG rolled out their first line of vegetarian/vegan meals on Friday, and they held a tasting (with wine!) in the store.

Look! A special vegetarian section on the menu!

There was a Black and White Bean Chili (look at the cute little signs!):

Jackie created this AMAZING Couscous with Chickpea Marinara. The sauce was to die for. She said it was her first time working with chickpeas and she was excited to have discovered a new food. Also on this plate is the New Mexico Corn Salad, which is basically the Southwestern Corn Salad from Cookin' Crunk. How cool that they're selling one of my dishes!!

The other new meatless dishes had cheese, so I didn't try those. But my partner Paul went crazy for their new Southwestern Bean & Spinach Lasagna. If you live in the Memphis/Collierville area, check out Take Home Gourmet at 2130 W. Poplar Ave. They change their menu often to keep things fresh, so they'll be trying out some more veg dishes soon.

Take Home Gourmet reserved two cooking demo spots at the Southern Women's Show at the Agricenter over the weekend. This annual women's expo has fashion shows, cooking demos, shopping, and "celebrity" appearances (this year, it was Sean Lowe from The Bachelor). John did a watermelon carving during their Friday demo slot, but they were so sweet to give me their Saturday spot.

So on Saturday, I made the Spaghetti Squash with Tofu and Tomatoes from Cookin' Crunk. Here I am cooking up some tofu:

And here's the finished dish (spaghetti squash sauteed in vegan butter and mixed with fried garlicky tofu, cherry tomatoes, and fresh basil):

Finally, on Sunday, I had a successful booksigning at Neshoba Unitarian Universalist Church in Cordova:

I sold 18 books (thanks to the awesome organizing and marketing efforts of Ms. Lorena Rostig)! The signing was a fundraiser for Gen Q, our local LGBTQ social club for young adults. I gave them 30 percent of my sales (which was 50 percent of my actual profit) to use for their upcoming trip to an LGBTQ advocacy event in Nashville.

Well, I'm tired. It's been a long, busy weekend. I'm off to bed.

Freaky Over Freekah!

Oh my god, have y'all tried freekah yet?! I first heard about it on the Our Hen House podcast a month or so ago. Even though it's an ancient grain and has been popular in Mediterranean cooking for centuries, but it's just starting to gain popularity here. Freekah is the new quinoa!

So what is it? It's a roasted green wheat cereal, meaning the wheat is harvested when the grains are still soft. Then it's sun-dried and roasted. The grains look a little like bulgur wheat. According to Wikipedia, the first mention of freekah comes from a 13th century Baghdad cookbook! How in the world am I just now learning about this stuff?

As for the taste, freekah has a nutty, smoky flavor. If you've ever had German smoked spelt, that's what it reminds me of. Or just imagine cooked bulgur with a dash of Liquid Smoke.

After hearing about freekah on Our Hen House, I promptly forgot about it. But last week, I was perusing the aisles of the Mediterranean Grocery on Park Avenue when I came across a bag of freekah. I tossed it in my basket. But when I got home, I wasn't sure what to do with it. I googled a few recipes, but nothing struck my fancy. Then I flipped over the bag and found a simple recipe for freekah pilaf on the bag.

Bingo! I used that recipe, but of course, I added some of my own touches. Namely, sauteed mushrooms. So here's my adapted recipe for Freekah Pilaf with Sauteed Mushrooms:

The dish came out so creamy, almost like a risotto. The recipe calls for a lot more liquid than with cooking, say, rice or quinoa. And it cooks for a long, long time. Maybe an hour? I would trade this stuff for rice any day.


Freekah Pilaf with Sauteed Mushrooms
Adapted from the Ziyad bag of freekah

1 cup dry freekah
5 cups vegetable broth
1 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. cumin
1 Tbsp. Earth Balance
1 8-ounce package sliced button mushrooms
1/2 tsp. Cajun seasoning
1/2 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. onion powder
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

Rinse the freekah using a fine-mesh sieve. Place it in a large pot and add the broth. If there are any freekah skins, they'll float to the top. Scoop those out and discard.

Add the oil and cumin and turn on high heat. Bring to a boil. Then place a lid on the pot and lower heat to a simmer. Allow to simmer for 45 minutes to an hour or until most of the liquid is absorbed and the grains are tender. You want the dish to be creamy, so make sure a teensy bit of liquid is left in the pot. You don't want a dry pilaf.

While the grains are simmering, melt the Earth Balance in a large skillet. Add the mushrooms and stir to coat with margarine. Allow the mushrooms to cook down for about 5 minutes, add the spices, and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes or until mushrooms are soft and have absorbed most of the margarine.

When the pilaf is done, stir in the mushrooms. Enjoy!

Feeding the Hungry Ghost

If you're familiar with vegan food writer Ellen Kanner's regular Meatless Mondays column on the Huffington Post, you know this woman can tell a great story like no other. Ellen has a gift for putting into prose exactly how I feel about dining and breaking bread and that satisfying nourished feeling I get after savoring the last bite of a delicious meal.

If you're not familiar with Kanner, you'll no doubt fall in love with this spunky little Jewish gal from Miami when you read her new book, Feeding the Hungry Ghost: Life, Faith, and What to Eat for Dinner (and you WILL be reading it because it's a don't-miss book and a surprising page-turner).

Feeding the Hungry Ghost is a collection of short stories about highlights in Ellen's life that center around food, and each story ends with a recipe. They're organized by the seasons (starts in January, ends at holiday time), so each story focuses on important moments from that time of the year. But the stories span from Ellen's childhood to her adult life.

There was the first time her grandmother Marcella gave her halvah ('"Halvah,' I said. And the name was sweet in my mouth as well, a magical incantation.") and the time a couple in Paris offered to share their bottle of wine with Ellen and her husband in a fancy restaurant ("In Miami, strangers don't offer you wine. Or if they do, I fear they've spiked it with drugs. But on this day in Paris, it seemed like one more bit of magic we were being granted.")

In case you're wondering about that "faith" word in the book's title, it's not a book about religion. Ellen isn't religious. But she is spiritual, and it seems, upon reading this book, that her connection with spirit comes through her relationship with healthy, nourishing whole foods. Take this gem of line, for example:

"Dishes like hopping john and soupe joumou sustain the body because they are made with ingredients that are humble but whole, nutritious, recognizable. They sustain the soul because they have a rich cultural and culinary history. They connect us to our past and each other. This is the real meaning of soul food. It's food that's meant to be shared, that lets you know you're not alone in the universe. And if that's not religion, I don't know what is.

Wow. I've never heard it put that way. But Ellen hit the nail on the head. And this entire book is filled with little (meatless) nuggets of wisdom like that. I rarely highlight passages in books, but this one is now filled with pink and green highlighter.

Not to mention that I want to make nearly every single dish in the book (aside from the ones with fennel, of course ... you know how I feel about fennel, anise, and anything remotely licorice-y). But for this review, I wanted to be seasonally appropriate and choose a dish from the winter chapter. I went with this Turkish Millet and Greens:

Millet, onion, garlic, tomatoes, kale, fresh dill, and walnuts are seasoned with pomegranate molasses. It's delightfully sweet, savory, and tangy all at once. And it reminded me of something my Granny has cooked somewhere along the way though I'm not sure how, as I doubt she's ever used hard-to-find pom molasses or millet. But there was something reminiscent about this dish that I just couldn't put my finger on.

Many of Ellen's dishes are of the Mediterranean or Middle Eastern variety. Since I'm going through a  Mediterranean phase right now, I'm dying to try every one. There's Vegetable Couscous with Preserved Lemon and Olive and a brown rice dish that she calls Rice in the Sahara (with slivered almonds, saffron, red lentils, and dates). But there's also an all-American zucchini bread and a chocolate cake that sound mouth-watering and simple.

If you like stories with your recipes, Ellen's book is the one for you. You get so much more than the little background paragraph in most cookbooks. Ellen lays out her whole life in food, and those stories are sure to help you find deeper meaning in what's on your plate.

Snack Bites: A Review

I keep snacks on my desk at work. Probably way more snacks than I'll ever eat. But it's a food security issue. Without a stockpile of pretzels, dried fruit, nuts, and other goodies, I worry that something catastrophic (the New Madrid Earthquake, the apocalypse, the last-ever season of American Horror Story) might happen and I will starve to death.

So when a company offers me a vegan snack product to review, I always say "Yes!" The world needs more snacks. My desk needs more snacks. One of the latest such offers came from Wholesome Meal. They have a line of nut butter-based protein snacks called Snack Bites.

Of the five flavors, only one is vegan. But they sent me a box with every flavor anyway. I re-gifted the non-vegan bites to my co-workers. I kept the Vegan Cran Almond Snack Bites for myself though:

These are little nut butter balls with crispy interiors. The Vegan Cran Almond is made with almond butter (non-GMO, of course), organic rice crisps, cranberries, molasses, and Proventive organic vegan protein (yellow pea protein isolate, organic sprouted brown rice protein concentrate, organic hemp protein concentrate, cranberry protein, chia protein).

Each little bite has 61 calories and four grams of protein. Perfect for mid-morning or mid-afternoon snacking. Unlike some of my desk snacks that might never get eaten (I'm sorry, goji berries!), I will certainly be enjoying all six of these tasty little bites. Few things make me happier than nut butter.

Vegan Food with Fun Names, Part Two

Yesterday, I blogged about my favorite new savory breakfast pancake, Okonomiyaki. But tonight, I'm featuring another fun-to-say dish with somewhat Asian roots.

I first heard about Ya Ka Mein on Joni Newman's blog, Just the Food. She posted a recipe for this Cantonese-Creole fusion noodle soup on her blog in honor of Ash Wednesday:

I'm not even sure where to begin because this stuff is that awesome. There's a homemade broth made from vegan beef stock, Cajun seasoning, smoked paprika (I was out, so I substituted Liquid Smoke), and Old Bay seasoning. The noodles are whole wheat spaghetti, and the seitan is fried and delicious.

Joni includes a recipe for homemade seitan, but I had some leftover seitan roast in the freezer. I thawed that out and fried it in a little coconut oil.

About those deviled tofu eggs? Delicious. Joni includes a recipe for those too. They're a little different from the Deviled Tofu Bites in my cookbook in that the tofu filling is made with extra-firm tofu instead of silken. And there's no Vegenaise. I had lots of the filling leftover, and I can't wait to try some spread on toast later this week. But I digress.

Ya ka mein is also known as "Old Sober." It's often touted as a Fat Tuesday hangover cure, and I'm sure it really does help fight off the next-day booze sickies. After all, we all know ramen noodles make the world's best hangover cure, and this dish isn't a far cry from my beloved ramen.

According to Wikipedia, no one quite knows how the soup originated. But legend has it that Ya Ka Mein was created by Chinese immigrants who moved to NOLA from California to build railroads and work on sugar plantations. Others claim African American U.S. troops invented Ya Ka Mein after they returned from the Korean War as a way to recreate a noodle dish they had in Korea. Who really knows? Regardless of its mysterious origins, it's amazingly delicious!

Vegan Food with Fun Names, Part One

I'm not sure what my deal is lately, but I've been really attracted to dishes with odd-sounding, fun-to-pronounce names. I keep seeing these dishes, mostly of the Asian persuasion, on vegan blogs and pinning them to my "Vegan Food I Want To Cook" board on Pinterest.

Now, I'm finally getting around to making a few. So tonight's post and tomorrow night's post will be dedicated to these dishes with fun names! First up — Okonomiyaki!

I found this recipe on The Real Meal. Before I read Allysia's post, I'd never even heard of okonomiyaki. But how much fun is that word to say? Every time I say it aloud, I feel the need to exclaim it and punch my fist in the air, Captain Planet-style.

Okonomiyaki is a savory Japanese pancake that can be made with all manner of ingredients. "Okonomi" means "what you like" and "yaki" means "grilled." What do I like grilled? Tofu!

Allysia's recipe substitutes tofu for the usual egg. That's blended with flour, nutritional yeast, olive oil, shredded cabbage, and green onion. Then the batter is fried, pancake-style. As for the sauce, mine is topped with Allysia's homemade okonomiyaki sauce (ketchup, soy sauce, vegan worcestershire) and chipotle Vegenaise. Allysia topped hers with regular vegan mayo, but I had a fresh jar of the chipotle flavor that I was excited to try.

This little pancake made for a fun and different breakfast. I served my pancakes with fresh apple and orange slices.

Nut Butter Universe Blog Tour

I'm today's stop on the blog tour for Robin Robertson's Nut Butter Universe. When I was offered the chance to review this book, I knew I'd love it before it even made it to my mailbox. Why? Because I LOVE NUT BUTTER! Like more than pretty much anything else, except for ramen noodles and vegan cheese pizza, of course.

Anyway, every single recipe in this book calls for nut butter. But before you go thinkin' that it's expensive to cook these dishes (cause honey, cashew butter and walnut butter ain't cheap), you should know that Robin includes instructions for making your own low-cost nut butters at home. All you need are nuts (any kind), a little oil (optional), and a trusty food processor. Of course, if you're a millionaire and don't have time to make your own, the storebought kind will work in these recipes too.

Before this book came along, I typically enjoyed my nut butter on toast or atop my oatmeal. But Nut Butter Universe opens up a world of possibilities for using nut butter in all kinds of ways. Use almond butter in Sweet Potato and Red Bean Stew, or use Brazil nut butter in Stuffed Squash with Brazil Nuts and Pistachios.

A walnut butter dressing is the perfect topping for Waldorf Salad, and what would Indonesian Gado-Gado be without peanut butter. Put a spin on the traditional PB&J by making the Peach-Almond Butter Quesadilla (almond butter, tortillas, and peach jam).

For dessert, macadamia nut butter is stuffed inside wonton wrappers for Coconut-Macadamia Wonton Cups with Fresh Mango. For something simple and traditional, try the Too-Easy Chocolate-Peanut Butter Fudge. Robin even shares fellow vegan cookbook goddess Bryanna Clark Grogan's recipe for Chocolate Double-Nut Clusters (made with a nut butter of your choice).

So what did I try? Well, the company that offered me the book to review gave me a choice of six or so recipes to choose from that I would be allowed to share the recipes for. Out of those, I couldn't resist trying this Artichoke Walnut-Butter Bisque:

Homemade walnut butter is cooked and blended with blanched baby artichokes (from the freezer section). Then it's topped with chopped marinated artichokes and roasted walnuts. I'd have never thought to combine artichokes and walnuts, but somehow it works very well. This warm and creamy soup really hit the spot on this cold, cold February day.

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Artichoke-Walnut Butter Bisque
Walnut butter adds buttery rich counterpoint to the artichokes in this elegant soup. Frozen artichoke hearts are used because they are superior in flavor to canned, and they don’t have the expense or labor of fresh ones.

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil or 1/4 cup water
1 large or 2 small shallots, chopped
2 (10-ounce) packages frozen artichoke hearts, thawed
3 cups vegetable broth

Salt

1/3 cup walnut butter
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne

1 cup plain unsweetened almond milk
1 (6-ounce) jar marinated artichokes, drained and chopped or thinly sliced

1 tablespoon snipped fresh chives, or garnish

2 tablespoons chopped toasted walnuts, for garnish

Directions:


In a large pot, heat the oil or water over medium heat. Add the shallots, cover, and cook until softened. Uncover and stir in the artichoke hearts, broth, and salt, to taste. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Simmer, uncovered, until the artichokes are tender, 15 to 20 minutes.


Stir in the walnut butter, lemon juice, and cayenne. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup right in the pot, or transfer the soup to a high-speed blender or food processor, in batches if necessary, and puree. Return the soup to the pot. Stir in the almond milk, then taste and adjust the seasonings, if necessary, adding more salt if needed. Simmer the soup over medium heat until hot, about 5 minutes.


Ladle into 4 bowls, top with the marinated artichokes, then sprinkle with the chives and walnuts, and serve hot.


Serves 4


From Nut Butter Universe by Robin Robertson. ©2013 Robin Robertson. Used by permission from Vegan Heritage Press.