Pine Nuts and Anchovies: Caesar

Real Caesar is based on anchovies, but appeals even to people who Hate anchovies. We made a popular version (“the best!”) at Rico’s, using traditional ingredients: raw yolks and anchovy paste, garlic, olive oil. Don’t bother going for it, as they’ve taken it off the menu. But I’d like to tell you how I made it so that you can make your own.

Caesar Salad
Yield is about 1 1/2 or 2 cups of dressing; use 2 Tablespoons or more per salad.
We made anchovy puree by the tin and then used spoonfuls in each batch of dressing. It is hard to get a smooth puree from a small amount of anchovies in a large food processor, but just use what equipment you have and try to make it as smooth as you can. Adding a little water may help (although the puree does not last as long with water added). If you are using a mortar and pestle, you’ll only need to puree a few anchovies per batch of dressing. This step does smell fishy, it caused baristas to gag when they washed our Cuisinart bowl.

1 tin anchovies
2 egg yolks
4-5 cloves garlic, minced
heaping Tablespoon prepared mustard (we used the yellow stuff!)
extra virgin olive oil, as needed (1 cup?)
salt
fresh cracked black pepper

romaine lettuce
croutons
parmesan

To Make the Dressing:

-puree the anchovies in a blender or food processor, or smash them by hand using a mortar and pestle, adding a little water as needed.
-place the yolks in a small-medium mixing bowl and add a heaping Tablespoon of anchovy puree. Add the garlic, mustard, and a large pinch of black pepper. Whisk all this together, then, while whisking, gradually stream in the olive oil until the mixture is glossy and the consistency of a thinnish pudding. Whisk steadily the whole time you’re adding oil, or the mixture can separate. Add salt if needed (the anchovies are salty), and more pepper, mustard, or garlic to taste.

For the Salad:

-use plenty of dressing!
-clean, dry and chop the lettuce. Toss the lettuce with dressing and some croutons if you like them, and grated hard cheese such as parmesan (or you can top the salad with parmesan). Put extra anchovies on top of the salad if you like.
-the dressing will keep a day or two, refrigerated, if you don’t use it all at once

On the Other Hand, if you Don’t Eat Anchovies…

At Quintessence, the original raw food restaurant in the East Village, we made Raw Caesar with blended pine nuts and Himalayan pink salt. We used flax oil for the health benefits, but it also gave the dressing a fishy taste. I don’t remember the recipe, but can give some general guidelines for those who like to experiment:

-pine nuts
-Himalayan pink salt (or your favorite salt)
-garlic? probably
-miso? I think
-flax oil

It was a simple dressing based on the creaminess of pine nuts and the richness of flax oil. Use plenty of salt to approximate the anchovy saltiness in real Caesar. I think a mild miso would add some of the pungency of fish, too. And garlic if you like it. Place everything in a powerful blender (we used a Vita-mix, but those are too pricey for the average home cook) and blend to a smooth creamy dressing. Adjust the seasonings to taste and add water to thin the dressing if needed (pine nuts are expensive, too, after all).
Garnish this one with crumbled Nori seaweed, or for an even saltier Caesar, Dulse strips.

Cucumber Spears

Today I read in Tassajara Cooking (by Edward Espe Brown) that cucumbers might be better cut into spears rather than sliced into rounds.

I had already cut my cucumber (into rounds) but next time I’ll try it.

Two Cookbooks

Piss me right off, when I bother following a recipe and then it fails. But sometimes cookbook authors know just the right way. The problem is choosing a cookbook you can trust. I’ve been cooking from these two recently, and they haven’t let me down.

The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen
by Peter Berley

This guy used to run the kitchen at Angelica Kitchen, the macro-vegan restaurant in New York. He uses a little butter here and there, but pretty much all of the recipes can easily be made vegan. The desserts are spectacular–I have been making the chocolate cake and the lemon rice pudding at a vegetarian restaurant I work in, and selling them out like crazy. The vegetable recipes are simple, but just a little better than what you might throw together without a recipe; they have that one extra ingredient that makes the dish memorable. And almost above all, included in this book is a recipe for BBQ tempeh, aka, vegan pork ribs.

Baking Illustrated
from the America’s Test Kitchen editors of Cooks Illustrated magazine

This is a big-ass book of recipes that almost all contain eggs, butter, and/or milk. BUT, the authors and test kitchen bakers tell you why they used what, so if you do need to make substitutions you will have some idea what might work. My friend and I once stayed up all night baking Christmas cookies in Queens, with this book as our guide. The ginger-snap style turned out especially nice with our vegan substitutions, and you can read about my experiments with the Baking Illustrated soda bread, vegan-style.

Have any trustworthy cookbook suggestions of your own?

Cerignola Olive Sourdough

Cerignola Olive Sourdough
3 Large or 4 Smaller Loaves

1/2 cup rye sourdough starter
1 cup water
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour, more as needed

-mix the starter and water with enough flour to make a thick batter, leaving it loosely covered in a large container until it is risen and bubbly (a few hours, depending on the temperature)

bubbly sourdough starter, from above
3 cups water
6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, more as needed
1 level Tablespoon fine sea salt
1 pint green Cerignola olives, pared of their pits and chopped course

-mix the bubbly starter with the water, 4 cups of the flour, and the salt to combine, adding more flour and mixing until a very wet dough forms (this is the key to airy ciabatta-type loaves)

-stir/knead the dough with a sturdy wooden spoon, adding just enough flour to make a dough; you will very nearly have to pour the dough into whichever container you wish to raise it in

-once the dough is mixed, stir in the chopped olives and continue mixing until they are evenly distributed throughout the dough

-place the dough in an oiled bowl or bin, loosely wrapped in a plastic bag, in a warmish place for 40 minutes

-after 40 minutes, turn the dough out onto a floured board and fold it like a letter. Rotate it and fold once again like a letter. Use plenty of flour, as the dough should still be very wet and almost batter-like. If you don’t quite understand the folding part, no big deal. Just fuck with the bread a little bit, forming some gluten and maybe incorporating a little flour if it is super sticky. You will notice the dough is getting springier. Return it to rising in the bowl or bin for another half hour, then repeat the folding. Repeat this rising/folding twice more

-after all the rising and folding, turn the dough out (it should be getting pretty airy and risen by now) onto a floured board and cut it into 3 or four even-sized pieces. Roll each one loosely like a rug.

-oil 3 or 4 bowls (depending how many loaves you are making) and dust them with semolina or cornmeal. Heat the oven at 475 degrees with a heavy pot in it*.

-take the dough pieces one-by-one and roll them into round loaves, careful not to deflate them if you want airy bread. The dough should be very soft, sticky and full of air bubbles. Place each loaf bottom-up in one of the oiled bowls. Wrap loosely in a plastic bag. Place 2 of the loaves in the refrigerator and keep 1 or 2 out to rise. They will take a half hour, maybe more, to rise. Perhaps. It depends on the temperature. Let them rise fully if you want airy bread, but if one deflates when you put it in the pot to bake, let the next one rise a little less.

-once the first loaf is risen, and the oven is hot, turn the loaf out into the pre-heated pot. Slash the top to let steam escape and place the lid on the pot before closing the oven. After 30 minutes, remove the loaf carefully from the pot onto the oven rack to continue baking for another 15-20 minutes. You can put the next loaf in the pot to bake at this point. Remove the loaves one-by-one from the refrigerator as the room-temperature loaves go into the oven.

-bake the loaves all the way. The crust should be caramel brown and will be very hard just out of the oven, but will soften to the crispy texture as the loaves cool. Cool them all the way before eating, or the texture suffers.

-for more bread baking instruction (more patient bread-making instruction!) see the Sesame Sourdough post. But remember, nobody can teach you to make bread, you just have to make some and learn. Homemade bread never turns out that bad!

*baking bread in a pot is nothing new, but the idea was made popular by Mark Bittman’s NY Times article featuring Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread. It is a technique worth learning, for kneaded bread or un-kneaded.

Instant Bread made with Buttery Spread

Real bread takes hours to ferment, proof, and bake. Plan ahead or you’re shit out of luck.

I just was reminded of Irish Soda Bread when reading through Baking Illustrated, a scientific baking manual by the positively anal America’s Test Kitchen crew. Here is a cheater’s–or an Irishman’s–way to home-baked bread, with, as the Test Kitchen crew describes it, “a tender, dense crumb and a rough-textured, crunchy crust”. It only takes a couple of hours from measuring flour and heating the oven to spreading on sweet strawberry jam and eating half the loaf.

The original recipe (Irish Brown Soda Bread on page 43 of Baking Illustrated), calls for buttermilk, of course. By mixing cider vinegar (use Bragg’s brand, ‘With the Mother’!) into soy or regular milk, you can avoid buying a carton of buttermilk just for this recipe. Also, the original recipe calls for butter, where I substituted Earth Balance organic vegan “Buttery Spread”.

Finally, the original recipe also includes cream of tartar, to react with the baking soda for leavening and preserve the buttermilk’s sour flavor in the finished loaf. Might as well add baking powder, if you’re going to do that (as baking powder is just soda with an acid–such as cream of tartar–added, anyway), and call it American Baking Powder Bread. The buttermilk, or vinegar, reacts with the baking soda to leaven the bread while vegan butter and a bit of maple syrup, along with the whole wheat flour, provide more than enough flavor. Besides, who has cream of tartar?

Using a portion of whole wheat pastry flour, which is finer and softer than regular whole wheat flour, keeps the bread from being too course.

Whole Wheat Irish Soda Bread
Since this is a quick bread, kneading it will only increase toughness. Stir the wet and dry mixtures together just enough to moisten all of the flour, then pat gently into a rough-shaped loaf on your oat-strewn counter before transferring the loaf gently onto a baking sheet or into a hot Dutch oven.

Ingredients:
2 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/4 cup regular whole wheat flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons Earth Balance buttery spread
1 1/2 cups plain soy milk or EdenBlend soy/rice milk blend
3 Tablespoons cider vinegar
3 Tablespoons pure maple syrup
quick rolled oats, as needed (1/2 cup approximately)

Directions:

Heat the oven up to 400 degrees (F). If you have a heavy cast-iron or clay Dutch-oven type pot with a lid, put both the pot and lid in the oven to heat up also. Otherwise, lightly oil a sheet pan and dust it with a few of the oats.

Combine the whole wheat pastry flour, regular whole wheat flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium-large mixing bowl. Rub the Earth Balance in with your hands until the mixture is even and feels kind of like wet sand.

Combine the soy milk with the vinegar and let it sit for a few minutes until it is thick and curdled. Stir in the maple syrup.

When the oven is heated–and only then, as the baking soda reacts for just a short time and your bread will rise and fall if it has to wait to go into the oven–add the soured soy milk mixture to the flour mixture and stir just to combine. Make sure that the flour is all moistened, but the mixture doesn’t need to be totally smooth. Don’t over-mix it.

Sprinkle the oats across your counter-top and turn the just-mixed dough out onto them. Turn it over once to coat the other side with oats, and pat it into a rough round, about 8″ across and 2-3″ high. If you are heating a Dutch oven, remember that this dough has to fit into it!

Use a serrated knife to cut a large “X” into the top of the loaf.

If you are baking the loaf in a Dutch oven, carefully pull the hot bottom of the pan out from the oven and gently transfer the loaf, “X”-up, into the pan. Place the lid on and put it back into the oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and continue baking the loaf for another 15 minutes or longer, until it is dark golden brown and a cake-test (skewer or toothpick) inserted into the center comes out clean.

If you are baking the loaf on a sheet pan, gently transfer the loaf to the sheet-pan, “X”-up, and place the sheet-pan into the hot oven (middle rack or upper-middle rack). Bake for 45 minutes, or until dark golden brown and a cake-test (skewer or toothpick) inserted in the center comes out clean.

Either way, spread a little bit of Earth Balance over the outside of the loaf while it is hot out of the oven, to keep the crust soft. Allow the loaf to cool almost to room temperature before cutting it open and digging in.

Makes one great big loaf.

Greenberg’s Food Combining Principles

The book Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford (North Atlantic 1993) offers advice on traditional, healthy food-pairing. Pitchford looks to ancient Chinese medicine and current nutrition research. He claims the only vegetables good to eat (combine) with fruit, for proper digestion, are lettuce and celery, and that beans are best eaten with green vegetables (such as kale).

But the movie Greenberg, starring Ben Stiller and directed/written by Noah Baumbach, offers alternative, intuition-based food combining principles. Here are the top three combinations from the movie, followed by one example that is not a food combination exactly but relevant nonetheless. See the movie for more.

1. Whiskey and Ice Cream Sandwiches
The movie’s plot revolves around Stiller’s character, Greenberg, watching his brother’s house while his brother is gone on business in Vietnam. When his brother’s assistant swings by to get her paycheck, she offers to pick up anything Greenberg needs from the store. “Make a list,” she says. Greenberg writes a list including, and limited to, whiskey and ice cream sandwiches. The most interesting thing about this food combination is that it is exactly the opposite of what anyone sincerely interested in food combining would choose if asked to plan ahead.

2. Whiskey and Raisins
Greenberg makes a habit of writing letters of complaint to companies that piss him off. His snack during one particularly eloquent letter-writing session (to Starbucks) is whiskey with raisins. The two most interesting things about this combination/scene are first, that Greenberg takes the opaque inner bag of raisins out of the box, so that the fact he is eating raisins is not explicit. Second, this combination is like a recipe for chocolate sorbetto (sorbet), made from cocoa powder sweetened with whiskey-soaked raisins.

3. Whiskey and Instant Noodles
There are a lot of eating scenes in Greenberg but Greenberg never cooks. His dinner one night is cup noodles and whiskey at the living room coffee table. Did you know that George Ohsawa, the founder of macrobiotics, is said to have enjoyed whiskey? The Japanese are also fond of noodles. And, the MSG in cup noodles is one thing that might stand up to the strength of pure whiskey when tasted together.

4. Whiskey and Inappropriate Behavior
All whiskey drinkers know about this classic combination. Actually it works best without any food at all! Greenberg gives several examples combining whiskey or another booze with inappropriate behavior; sexual and vulgar. See for yourself in the movie, as I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone.

Beelzebub Gravy

Once you’ve been vegan for a good long-enough while you’ll feel fine about pouring straight oil on your food. Got to get those calories, or whatever.

Until then, try making this gravy for your seitan. Use the broth from the seitan in the previous recipe. You might try using soymilk instead, but I have not done that. It could be alright, at best.

Beelzubub Gravy

2 Tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup whole wheat flour
2 Tablespoons nutritional yeast
pinch hot red pepper or black pepper
salt if needed
broth as needed

-make roux with flour and oil; add yeast and pepper, then whisk in stock and thicken to gravy

Mexican Chicken-Style Seitan (Sans Gravy)

Seitan is a hearty vegan protein. My dad pronounces it SATAN, which is entirely acceptable although alternative pronunciations are preferred by some. The homemade version is somewhat of a pain to master, but much better than the store-bought stuff. Vital wheat gluten flour is a convenience product that consists of only the gluten-forming proteins of the wheat berry. Get it in bulk at health-food stores. While seitan can be made from just whole wheat flour and water, that is a messy process. Try making seitan from vital wheat gluten first, then try the traditional method if you like.

The seasonings are open to modification. This combination is particularly savory, especially with the forthcoming GRAVY, which I will add in a future post. Adjust the amount of chipotle to your desired spiciness. Garden oregano, which doesn’t seem to have as many uses as some other garden herbs, lends subtle reinforcement to the ‘Mexican’ note provided by dried chipotle chilies. So do the carrots, believe it or not.

For some reason I really like eating this with a mixture of short grain brown rice and wild rice, pressure-cooked together in about a 3:1 ratio (cook them in a regular pot if you don’t have a pressure cooker). You might say wild rice brings out the true chicken flavor from the seitan, but, being vegan, you are obviously wrong because seitan doesn’t have any chicken in it at all.

This is a recipe ‘in progress’, but one that Mama makes repeatedly so it must be worth something. See what you think.

Mexican Chicken-Style Seitan
this serves six or more with rice and keeps well (in fact it is a good food to eat cold without bothering to close the refrigerator door, if you are in that kind of a mood); gravy forthcoming

2 ½ cups vital wheat gluten, aka wheat gluten
¼ cup nutritional yeast
1 teaspoon sea salt
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup soy sauce
1 ½ cups water

3 quarts water, more as needed
1/2 cup additional soy sauce
4 carrots
4 scallions (green onions)
4 whole garlic cloves
5 small branches fresh oregano, or 1 teaspoon dried
2-4 dried chipotle chillies
salt to taste

Put the wheat gluten, nutritional yeast and 1 teaspoon salt in a medium bowl and stir them together with your hands or a utensil.
Measure the olive oil, 1/4 cup soy sauce and 1 1/2 cups water into a different bowl and mix them up, then dump the wet mixture in with the wheat gluten mixture.
Stir the gluten mixture and wet mixture together with sweeping motions so that as much water as possible touches as much dry stuff as possible right away. Don’t over-stir before you judge the mixture! Before it is totally mixed, see if there is a lot of dry gluten at the bottom of the bowl. If so, add a splash more water. If the mixture seems crumbly and soggy, on the other hand, add some more gluten (yes it is counter-intuitive, as you would think that a crumbly mixture needs extra water, but in fact it’s the other way around).
Knead the mixture briefly just to combine all of the ingredients and make sure there are no dry spots. Set it aside in the bowl while you get the broth ready.

For the broth, measure or eyeball about 3 quarts of water into a large pot. Add 1/2 cup soy sauce. Turn the heat on high to start the mixture simmering. Clean the carrots and cut them into large chunks before adding them to the pot. Slice the scallions and add them, along with the garlic (peeled and left whole, but slightly crushed with the blunt end of your knife), oregano and chipotles.

When the broth starts boiling, tear or cut the gluten mixture into pieces. Make the pieces big or small, but know that they expand and grow as they cook. Add them to the broth, and, once they are all in, reduce the heat to low or medium-low to keep it simmering gently. Allow it to simmer for an hour or so, adding water as needed to keep the gluten covered. There is no need for a lid, but stir occasionally because the gluten will tend to float and dry out on the surface. Careful not to boil it violently.

Home Cooking versus Restaurant Options in Colorado Springs

My recent food adventures have been limited to simple variations on the grains-beans-greens theme punctuated with occasional excursions into the Colorado Springs restaurant scene. While simple home-cooked meals are always satisfying, we don’t always have time for them. Too bad it is nearly impossible to get legitimate food in a restaurant!

The most satisfying meal is based on whole grains. Brown rice, quinoa, or even homemade bread are all good choices for the grain. Combined with soft, pressure-cooked, onion-and-cumin-spiked beans and simple steamed or seared greens or a sturdy orange vegetable (see my many posts on carrots and squash), grains make a fully satisfying meal.

Several restaurants in New York City (most notably Souen) serve spectacularly simple, cheap, satisfying meals of whole grains, beans and steamed vegetables. In Colorado Springs and Manitou, it is possible to get a good organic salad or a more-complicated–and not organic–approximation of grains-greens-beans, but anything more requires home cooking. Here are the places I go in a pinch:

Mountain Mama Natural Foods
This health food store is on Uintah street just West of downtown Colorado Springs. There is not an official place to sit and eat, but curbside picnics are fine in warm weather. The deli sandwiches are made on house-baked, whole grain bread (which is sweetened with honey, but otherwise vegan) and stacked with fresh, organic vegetables, including shredded carrots, sprouts, onions and avocado. The Italian-seasoned tofu sandwich, available wrapped in the produce cooler by the fruit, should be eaten with sesame blue chips and shared by two people. Whole wheat bread and blue corn provide satisfying, though ‘processed’, grain base, with fresh, organic raw vegetables a nice change from cooked greens and tofu a hearty replacement for whole beans. The sandwich is around $6, but you’ll probably spend a few more on chips, kombucha and maybe organic dark chocolate.

The Mate Factor
The Mate Factor, by Soda Springs Park in Manitou Springs, offers another variation on the raw-vegetable sandwich. Their tofu and vegetable wrap is made in a whole wheat tortilla, with lettuce, tomato, green olives, red onions and baked tofu. It comes with shredded cheese, which they are happy to omit for vegans. The vinaigrette dressing is vegan also. Who knows if this thing is organic?! It is, however, tasty and fresh. The Mate Factor also serves organic green Mate tea, hot and with re-fills. Though it doesn’t stick to your ribs like hot cooked grains-greens-beans, the tofu wrap is a good light lunch. Vegan carob-chip cookies make good dessert. The wrap is just over five dollars, with tea less than two and the cookie just under two also.

Adam’s Mountain Cafe
Adam’s, also in Manitou, is the only place I know of that serves organic, plain brown rice. Get it next to the garden salad with sesame-crusted tofu, and red lentil dal if you are extra hungry. The brown rice isn’t half as good as homemade, pressure-cooked brown rice. But, the salad is pretty amazing, with raw carrot spirals, red cabbage, cucumber slices and pea shoots and a creamy sesame-ginger dressing or a more oily lime-chipotle dressing. Adam’s is the only sit-down restaurant I believe really tries to use organic ingredients. They also offer cooked vegetable and grain dishes, such as Tibetan vegetables over brown rice with tamari, garlic and ginger. Meals get up to around fifteen dollars, or even more with added tofu, here, but the quality is dependable and worth the money.

King Chef Diner
Why am I even mentioning this place? They say the fake sausage is vegan, but I don’t believe it. Grains are limited to white-flour tortillas, or hash browns (those aren’t really a grain, they are made out of POTATOES). However, the green chile is spicy, vegan and very ‘green’. The walls will also blind you with their boldness, and the waitresses look like they just rolled out of bed after two hours of fitful, drunken half-slumber.

Rico’s/Poor Richards
This place is downtown Colorado Springs on Tejon Street. Here is the complicated and not-organic version of grains-greens-beans. Upon discovering their Seared Greens and White Beans, I became obsessed with them and ate them twice a week with corn chips on the side. They were less than five dollars, though now cost close to eight. After being hired in the kitchen and learning to make the greens and beans myself, I still consider it one of the more legitimate meals available in town, although the ingredients are not organic. The corn chips are not natural, which can be proved by simple inquiry of staff as to their ingredients. Brown rice is available, though microwaved. Elizabeth David wondered, in her English Bread and Yeast Cookery if it would be acceptable to bring one’s own bread to a restaurant. If it were, I would bring my own bread to eat with Rico’s beans and greens. Poor Richard’s offers part-whole-grain pizza crust (spelt), with hummus and a choice of vegetables (avocado pizza!).

Various Falafel Shops
The falafel shops I go to are Arabica Cafe and Taste of Jarusalem, both downtown Colorado Springs. They offer good hummus, raw vegetables, bean-flour falafel and white pita or rice. If only the grains were whole and the ingredients organic, these places would be ideal. Even so, they offer tahini sauce that provides a sesame fix, and satisfying beans in the hummus and falafel. Dolmas are wrapped in hearty green grape leaves. For less than ten dollars you can get a plateful. Arabica cafe specifies one meal as ‘vegan’ on the menu. The vegetable and falafel plates at Taste of Jarusalem are vegan as long as you don’t get the yogurt sauce (tzaziki).

El Tesoro
Located downtown Colorado Springs next to the library and Pike’s Peak Community College. Happy hour caters to students with cheap house margaritas. They offer cooked greens (spinach) in a burrito, but a better option is combining sides of the vegan pinto beans with blue-corn tortillas and fresh guacamole. Corn chips and salsa come with the table. The bean tacos, available without cheese, are filled with the same pinto beans, or black beans with lettuce and some zucchini on the side. But, they cost 8-10 dollars (lunch and dinner prices vary) plus more to add guacamole. The sides of beans and tortillas are just two dollars each, with guacamole ‘market price’ of around six dollars for a whopping bowl-ful.

La’au’s
Another taco shop, a few blocks north on Tejon Street near Colorado College. The tacos are good, with vegetables, beans, guacamole and corn or tomato salsa. The atmosphere sucks. Tacos are just a couple of dollars each. Get mini-bottles of Sol beer for the mood. Flour tortillas are made in-house, but of white flour. Corn tortillas and fried tortilla chips offer whole grain corn. The vegetables are a blend of onions, peppers, zucchinis; good but not organic.

Smiley’s
Morning oatmeal with thawed frozen blueberries. Up on Tejon Street. The oatmeal is sweetened with something like brown sugar. The best part is the pile of blueberries. Thick mugs of coffee. All the drowsy CC kids go there for breakfast at noon on the weekends. They also have homemade wheat bread, though it obviously contains a good portion of refined white flour too. For a pseudo-vegan treat, get it toasted with no butter and soak it with honey. Oatmeal, toast and coffee for two will run you about 20 dollars.

Wooglin’s Deli
Rarely go here. They do have Wimburger’s sourdough rye toast and beany, vegan red chile. Odwalla carrot juice in the drinks case stands in for a vegetable. Chile, toast and carrot juice should be less than ten dollars. There are booths to lurk in and vats of hot coffee, too. Located a few doors up from Couture’s laundrette up on Tejon Street. Carrot juice while you wash your clothes? Then you will have a fantastic tan to go with all your favorite shirts!

So it is apparent the options in town are very limited when it comes to getting a balanced meal. The best choice is to cook food yourself, with fresh organic produce, dried beans and whole grains. But an occasional trip out to one of these places will provide entertainment and a reminder of just how good home cooking is.

Soup Part Two: Onion

Tuesday 19 January 2010 at the Macrobiotic Cooking Club

Time can turn simple ingredients spectacular. Miso, sourdough bread and onion soup are all examples of this phenomenon. Last week at cooking club we made onion soup, “French” style, by caramelizing the onions long and slow.

Cutting the Onions

There are many fine ways to cut an onion. How you choose to cut your onions should depend on how you’ll cook them. If you want the onions to disappear into the dish, mincing or grating them works well. For crunchy quick-cooked onions, thick slices are ideal.
For onion soup, make thin uniform slices. They’ll caramelize evenly. The onions shouldn’t totally dissolve into the soup, but they shouldn’t hang six inches off the spoon either. For short curves of onion, use the technique I learned from the chef at Rico’s:

1. Cut both ends off the onions, and cut the onions in half vertically. Peel each half.

2. Now slice each half vertically, rather than horizontally, into thin pieces. All of the pieces should wind up the same size, as opposed to when you cut horizontally and the slices on the ends are smaller than the slices in the middle.

Use a sharp knife when you cut onions; the layers will separate maddeningly under a dull blade.

Caramelizing the Onions

Start with a generous pool of oil in a heavy, hot pan. Toss in the onions, stir them up and sprinkle on some salt before you close the lid. Use just a small amount of salt, remembering that the onions shrink a lot and so the salt will concentrate.

Keep the closed pot over high heat, opening it occasionally to stir the onions. They will start to get softer, smaller and more see-through. If you are stirring them often enough, they will gradually turn light gold brown, then darker and darker. At this point, leave the lid off the pot and turn down the heat to a more moderate level. When you stir, the moisture from the onions will at first be enough to clean any brown bits from the bottom of the pan. After a while, the onions will lose enough moisture that you will have to add water or stock as you stir.

This is where the French onion style comes in.
Each time the onions threaten to burn on the bottom of the pan, stir them and add a ladle-full or so of stock (or water) to clean the browning parts off the bottom of the pan. Incorporating this browned onion residue also incorporates the deep, rich and sweet flavor associated with onion soup.

Continue cooking, then stirring and moistening, then cooking, then stirring and moistening, until the onions are very dark brown. They will reduce in volume to perhaps 1/10th of their original volume. The whole caramelizing process may take two hours, for really dark brown rich soup. Be patient.

Once the onions are caramelized, all you have to do is add the rest of the water or stock and let it simmer for a little while to infuse the flavor. The result is dark as beef stock and nearly as ‘meaty’ but sweeter, too.

French Onion Soup
6-8 servings
This is based loosely on a recipe from Mother’s macrobiotic cookbook, “The Macrobiotic Way” by Michio Kushi

10 sweet yellow onions, medium sized
1/4 cup toasted sesame oil, or more to taste
sea salt
1 pound fresh shiitake mushrooms, more or less to taste
tamari soy sauce
1 bunch scallions (green onions), garnish

1. Peel the onions and slice them into thin, even pieces. Heat a large, heavy soup pot and add 3 Tablespoons toasted sesame oil. Add the onions with a pinch of salt and caramelize them according to the instructions detailed above.

2. Meanwhile, remove the stems from the mushrooms and slice them as you wish. Heat the remaining Tablespoon of oil in a separate soup pot and cook the mushrooms, stirring, until they are brown. Add 3 quarts of water, more or less, to the mushrooms. Simmer over low heat, tasting periodically and seasoning with tamari as you caramelize the onions. Use this liquid to deglaze the onion pan, as detailed above.

3. When the onions are fully brown, add all of the mushroom broth (including the pieces of mushrooms) to the onion pot and allow the mixture to simmer at least 1/2 hour. Add more tamari or sea salt as needed. It shouldn’t taste like soy sauce, but the tamari soy sauce lends a unique ‘brown’ flavor that sea salt lacks.

4. Garnish the soup with thin-sliced scallions atop each bowl. Float croutons in the soup if you like. Or, eat it as we did, with fresh crusty sourdough to dip in the broth.

At Meeting Thirteen of the Macrobiotic Cooking Club, we accompanied that onion soup with the following:

Buckwheat Sourdough

Butter and Red Leaf Salad, with
Quick Pickled Cucumbers and Radishes, Blanched Snow Peas and
Orange-Sherry Vinaigrette