kitchen dancing

Really. I could eat the stuff every day. I've even made it at home a few times, but have decided that fermenting cabbage is ill-advised in a small flat with no balcony option, so now I buy it (often) from a Chinese supermarket and travel agency. This pleases me. Kimchi and avocado are pretty much a match made in heaven. I could just take an avocado, stuff it with kimchi, and call it lunch. Sometimes I do. But kelp noodles make everything more exciting, so ...

If you set this up in the morning, it takes only a few minutes to put together when you get home in the evening. And it's ridiculously yummy. The kind of yummy where you get a little sad when you approach the bottom of the bowl because you never want the yum to end. But the good news is that you can make it again! I do this with kelp noodles because I am hopelessly in love with them. It would also work with bean thread noodles, in which case you can skip the whole marination brouhaha.

Kimchi kelp festival in a bowl.

Marinade:
1 orange worth of juice
2 tbs tamari or coconut aminos
1 large clove of garlic, chopped
1 tsp of fresh grated ginger (I use a lemon zester for this and the garlic)
1/2 -1 tsp reishi powder (optional, but fun)
2-3 tbs black sesame seeds, bashed around a bit in a mortar and pestle
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp of agave

Noodles and such:
1 package kelp noodles
big bunch enoki mushrooms (optional)


In the morning (or at noon - this is best if it marinates for a few hours), mix all the ingredients for the marinade together, rinse a package of kelp noodles, give them a few quick snips with some scissors, and then dump the kelp noodles in the marinade. Add the enoki. Mix until everything is coated with marinade. Forget about them for the day (leave them on the counter if your flat is cool, put 'em in the fridge if you live somewhere where temperatures occasionally rise high enough to allow you to walk about in short sleeves). You can sub peanuts or peanut butter for the sesame if you want. I won't tell anyone.

When you get hungry that evening, chop up:

1 red pepper in fiiiiiine slices. If you have a mandoline, this would be a good time to whip it out
2 heads of baby bok choy or other leafy green, chopped into lovely ribbons. If you feel fancy, call it "chiffonade".

Also, consider how much kimchi you want to eat. Considerations include: How much kimchi do I have? This usually answers the question for me. But sometimes I go further and ask: Am I going to be sweating and twisting in close proximity to people who are likely to be unimpressed with the metabolic byproducts of kimchi overconsumption wafting under their noses (ie - is tomorrow morning a yoga day?). I have a WHOLE PACKAGE of kimchi, and it's a Friday night. Ashtangis will understand what this means. The rest of you can Google.

Add the veg to your noodly mess. Stir. Get the noodly mess to your desired temperature (I eat this at room temp, but you could refrigerate it for a refreshing summer salad, or warm it in the dead of winter). Add

kimchi and some of the kimchi juice
1 avocado, chopped

Mix. Taste. Adjust seasonings. If your kimchi is extra hot or pungent, adding a little more agave is a good idea, or if you find yourself a little short on kimchi, you can add some chili flakes.

Devour while making little happy yum noises.

This serves two generously, and trust me, if you have a partner, it is best if you both eat this.

Rocking out with: the Muppets!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H3XGfGKJas

So... I seem to have turned into that person who shows up on a Friday night at the yoga studio. We're going to watch a movie about Ashtanga and eat veg/raw food (I'll be sticking to the raw vegan food). I also seem to have gone mostly raw over the past little while. Not intentionally, but by consistently eating what makes me feel good. My body isn't cutting me a lot of slack lately- between recovering from the fire in November, keeping things running at work, and having a blast with friends/myself/my books/the amazing Edinburgh winter - I'm just not willing to eat stuff that makes me feel unnecessarily sluggish or crappy when I can instead eat stuff that makes me feel pretty damn good, all things considered.

So, here's what I'm bringing to the Gathering of Yogis:

Raw Mole dip

soak in just enough warm water to cover for at least an hour (if you have a superblender) or a few hours (if you are using an immersion blender or a non-super blender):
3/4 cup raisins
2 dried figs
1 dried ancho chili, deseeded and de-membraned
1 dried guajillo chili, deseeded and de-membraned
3 sundried tomato halves
1/2 star of star anise
1 small cinnamon stick
6 whole cloves
(if you don't have a superblender, use powdered versions of the spices)

Dump into the blender (including the soak water) and BLEND!

Now, add:

1 c raw almonds (preferably soaked) or 1/2 c raw almond butter
2 heaping tbs raw pumpkinseed butter
2 heaping tbs raw black sesame tahini (I'm sure that white would work too, I just don't have any on hand)
2 small (or 1 large) cloves garlic
1 tomato, chopped
pinch sea salt
1/2-3/4 cup raw unsweetened chocolate (chopped) OR equivalent in cocoa powder + cocoa butter
2 tbs cacao powder

optional add-ins:
1-2 tbs chaga mushroom powder
1 tsp mexican oregano
1/3-1/2 tsp smoked paprika

blend! blend! blend! You may need to add more water, as this is quite thick. I use this as a dip for fresh veg (carrots, courgette, red peppers, cukes), and sometimes as a spread on raw bread (great for when you want something really heavy and filling). Or I just eat it with a spoon. If you usually make cooked mole, be warned that the chili is going to be a lot sharper in the raw version, so you may want to only put in half your normal amount of chili at the beginning, taste, and then add the rest if you want (I want!). It's best to make this the day before, and let it sit in the fridge overnight so that the flavors can romance each other a bit.

Dancing along to: Los Fabulosos Cadillacs' Matador, because I was introduced to the wonders that are Argintinian ska and mole sauce at the same time, and they are forever linked in my little soul.

Well, except for the part where you have to wait all year for in-season tomatoes.

6 cups chopped, in-season tomatoes
2 star anise
1 scant tsp of flaked smoked salt, or 1/2 tsp finely-ground salt
1/2 -1 tsp vanilla sugar (normal sugar that you keep a vanilla bean in, NOT the horrible vanilla-flavoured powdered sugar that you can buy) be stingy at first, you can always add more later, but if you oversugar, this will be yucky.
Optional: 1/2 cup dried mushrooms, ripped into small bits.

Combine all this in the morning in a bowl. Let it sit all day. Hell, let it sit 24 hours if you have the time. If you live somewhere hot, let it sit in the fridge. If you live somewhere cool, leave it out. If you use the optional mushrooms, they'll absorb some of the juices.

At dinnertime,remove and discard the anise. Take out half the tomatoes and puree them. Combine blended and non-blended tomatoes. Heat gently if you want to, and then add 1-2 tbs fresh thyme, and a grind of black pepper. Adjust salt to taste.
Optional: add 1c cooked quinoa or millet or other small non-disintegraty grain and a squeeze of lemon juice and garnish with avocado for a more substantial meal.

Serve hot or cold. When tomatoes are in season, I prefer this without the mushrooms, and cold.

slow and lazy music: hymns of the 49th parallel, kd lang

...as in a separation of colours.

First, I made clear tomato consommée, then used the brightly-coloured pulp as a tomato sauce. The consommée is from the Terre a Terre cookbook, and all I did was add a single star anise to the liquid. It takes overnight to make, but is pretty much the easiest recipe ever. Usually tomato consommée is cleared using egg whites, but you can also just drain chopped and blended tomatoes through a double layer of cheesecloth overnight. You get the most exquisitely rich broth. Oh yum. I used 1 kg of tomatoes, so the recipe for the sauce assumes that you have pulp from that. For the main dish:

Tomato Sauce
1 batch tomato pulp (from 1 kg of tomatoes)
1/2 sweet red pepper, chopped supa-fine
1/2 tsp garlic-infused olive oil
2 tbs lemon vinegar OR 2 tbs lemon juice + 1 tsp agave
8 cured black olives, chopped
tiny pinch cinnamon (be stingy. you can always add more, but you can't do anything if you add too much the first time)
black pepper
warm water to thin to the consistency you want

Mix everything together and let sit while you pull the rest of dinner together.

Creamy cauliflower crunch

1 small head cauliflower, in itsy-bitsy pieces
1 tbs white miso
1 tsp smoked salt
1 cup hummous (this was leftover from a weekend biking expedition, approximate recipe below)
2 cups bitter greens, chopped + juice from 1/2-1 lemon

Marinate bitter greens in the lemon juice in a separate bowl and let them sit there for a few minutes (say 10 or 15). Mix everything else together.


Hummous with a kick

3c sprouted (or cooked) chickpeas
2-3 tbs tahini (more if you want)
6-8 sundried tomatoes, soaked in just enough water to cover
3 pitted dates, soaked along with the tomatoes
3 cloves garlic (reduce if you do not loooooove raw garlic)
1 cup parsley
3 tbs nutritional yeast
lots and lots of lemon juice
salt to taste
optional capers

Put the parsley aside. Dump everything else, including soaking water, in a blender or food processor. Blend! Blend! Blend! Add parsley. Now, pack it (minus 1 cup for leftovers) as part of a lunch and go on a nice long bike ride. Stop and have a picnic, preferably by the ocean.

chromatographic and crunch music: mercan dede

It's raining and I'm feeling all quiet and chill and have time to actually spend on food prep tonight, which is a bit of an anomaly lately. So I indulged.

I've been having way too much fun playing with raw food recipes lately. Here is my latest creation, using what I had around from the veg box. I always think of this kind of thing as "kitchen-ninja" cooking. I mean, my kitchen is very well stocked, but I do make a point to use *everything* in the veg box every week, which leads to some interesting concoctions from time to time. I like this sort of food adventure. Now, let me just start by proclaiming my love of kohlrabi. It's crunchy and delicious and looks vaguely alien, all of which appeal to me. I didn't properly appreciate it until living in Germany for two years... now I squeal with glee when it appears in my veg box, or when I see it at the farmer's market. However, I also have some sprouted chickpeas, and for some reason, I couldn't shake the urge to make them into ravioli filling. Below is what happened

Kohrabi ravioli, raw kitchen-ninja style.

1 smallish kohlrabi, peeled and sliced supa-thin (I used a mandoline)

marinate the slices in juice from 1 lemon and about 1/3 tsp salt while you do everything else.

filling:
2.5 cups sprouted chickpeas (or use cooked ones if you'd rather)
2 tbs sweet white miso
1 tsp ume paste
2 tbs nutritional yeast
1 tsp tahini
1 tbs very finely chopped preserved lemon
1-2 tbs chopped fresh rosemary
salt to taste

Put the chickpeas, miso, ume paste and nooch in a food processor or blender and blend! blend! blend! Add a bit of water if you want! Make it as smooth or chunky as you want. This is all about you and your smooth vs. chunky ravioli filling preferences. Just make sure the paste holds it's shape when you scoop it. Fold in lemon, rosemary, and black pepper. Taste, and then add salt or soy sauce. If you can wait a few minutes before salting, that's even better, as the miso, ume paste and lemon are going to make this pretty salty. Undersalt slightly, as the kohlrabi is also salty.

I made lots of the filling, and also just use it as hummous (it's especially good on pears or with mushrooms), or fold in chopped onions, grated carrots and some kind of grain, and then make it into burgers.

Nibble at one of the kohlrabi slices. Is it ridiculously salty? If no, proceed. If yes, rinse. It's nice if you don't have to rinse, because the lemon tastes good.

Make little raviolis by sandwiching a spoonful of chickpea mixture between two kohlrabi discs. Serve by drizzling with diluted pomegranite molasses and a sprinkling of cocoa nibs. You'd be surprised how well chocolate and rosemary go together. (I diluted with apple vinegar, but those who are less into vinegar than me may want to dilute with apple juice or sauce, or even olive oil, if you are into adding olive oil to things).

I had this with a tomato soup, which I suspect is the bastard love child of harissa and bouillabaisse. And no, I didn't measure any of the spices, so you're left to your own devices in terms of amounts. Add a bit, blend, taste and adjust. Or just use a tsp of ras-el-hanout. The soup was ungodly yum. I wish I had measured the spices for y'all, but I have confidence in your ability to wing it.

5 smallish tomatoes
1 orange worth of juice
1 stalk celery
2 sun dried tomatoes
fennel seeds
aniseed
cinnamon
ground coriander
chili pepper
a tiny nub of fresh ginger
water to the consistency you want
salt to taste
handful sprouted (or cooked) wheatberries.

Blend! Blend! Blend! everything except the wheatberries together. You may need a pinch of agave, depending on the sweetness of your tomatoes and orange. Stir in wheatberries. Top with fresh basil and mint (or coriander, or parsley, but I seem to be out of both of those). You can also leave out the wheatberries and just serve this with bread or crackers. That might be classier. But we don't worry about "classy" here in the kitchendancing cave.

Music to chill out to: leonard cohen. the sisters of mercy.

Okay, these are sooo not pakoras. They are loosely inspired by pakoras, and even then, "loosely" might be too restrictive a term for what I've done. Basically, I wanted something to serve as a vehicle for some awesome chipotle tamarind-date chutney I have on hand. Also, I had to use up some sprouted buckwheat, and I've been having this methi craving... you can see where this is going. Like many of my "recipes", the end dish was the product not of a plan, but of a series of unconnected thoughts that I just happened to have while making dinner. Serendipitous dinner creation is a wonderful thing. Option 1 (which I have been known to do): mix chutney into sprouted buckwheat or cold rice or any other vaguely starchy thing that the chutney will adhere to and then eat it on salad. Option 2 is slighly more elegant, and much prettier than it looks here. Sometimes you only bother with one photo before devouring the food. It is, after all, a food blog, not a photo blog.

3-4 c. sprouted buckwheat, half of it blended to a paste
1 tbs toasted cumin seeds
a few toasted fenugreek seeds, squished roughly
1 tbs toasted coriander seeds, squished roughly
1 tsp garam masala
1/3 cup methi leaves, crumbled (I used dried ones)
1 large carrot, finely grated
1 handful of dulse, torn into tiny pieces
as much jalapeno as you want, chopped fine
1/2 tsp garlic paste (1 small clove)
1 tsp ginger paste
squeeze lemon juice
large-ish pinch smoked salt

Mix everything together. At this stage, you can just use it as a highly addictive pate and scoop it up with red pepper chunks (and then drizzle them with tamarind chutney). To make something a little more stand-alone, you'll need to add something to make it a bit less wet and then form it into patties. You can use ground dried coconut or chickpea flour or oat flour. I used chickpea flour, since I don't particularly care if something is 100% raw, but I do care that it's not full of fat. I added about 1/3 of a cup. Make your own choices on this one. I imagine if one owned a dehydrator, one could then dehydrate them for a billion hours. I don't, so I didn't. Also, that would have meant waiting, which frankly, I was simply not willing to do. I just decorated them with the chutney that caused all this in the first place and ate them. With a giant salad, because I'm that kind of vegan. Yuuuuuuuuum.

As a note, one of the things that keeps me from eating more raw food is that I like to eat without adding fat (or relying on large amounts of high-fat food like nuts, avocados or coconuts), and I do love my starches. Everyone has their own take on nutrition etc. nowadays, but the thing that works for me is to do a no-added-fat vegan, starch-based diet with lots of fresh fruit and veg. Doing this, I run, bike, do mad science, goof off, read, have a personal life, get up far too early because I hate missing out on life, and am generally happy and healthy and full enough of energy to annoy those around me in the early mornings. That being said, I like the lightness of eating a high proportion of raw foods, especially in the summer when I have to eat so much heavy food when I travel for work and so when I'm home... sprouted buckwheat! Yay! These are nice because they're starchy and filling and heavy without being full of fat. Also, can I just mention again that they're the perfect vehicle for tamarind-date chutney?

A little note: I wrote down the conservative amounts for the spices because my chutney was super-flavourful. If I was having these alone, or with coriander chutney, I'd probably up the coriander seeds, ginger and garlic.

serendipitous music based on... : in C, by whoever you want, dammit.

I've been eating more raw food lately, and I loooove it. Granted, I've been a super salad fan for some time now, so I fail miserably at convincing people that vegans don't just eat salad. I mean, I don't eat *only* salad, but I do eat a lot of it. Because salad is yummy, and it makes me feel so good when I eat it, and it's crunchy and colourful! Now, I've said it before: if the only option is a sad iceberg lettuce, then the prospect of a giant salad is indeed rather underwhelming. But there's no reason it has to come to that, is there? Repeat after me: There is no excuse for boring salad. EVER. Also, I love saffron (just for the record). This vaguely middle-eastern and not-vaguely yummy. So satisfying. So tastey and simple. And yeah. Just.. yeah.

Bottom layer:
sprouted quinoa
chopped dates
chopped green olives
chopped rocket (arugula for those of you on the other side of the pond)

Salad layer:
chopped tomatoes
shredded purple cabbage
veeeeery thinly sliced carrots

the salad is marinated in
crushed fennel, saffron, a drop of lime oil, salt and pepper, all dissolved in apple cider vinegar.

music: mirah. yay!