Cashew-Tofu "Ricotta"

As promised, here is a stand-alone post with my version of cashew-tofu "ricotta," which is as close to a classic vegan staple as you can get on these here danged modern internets.

• 1 cup of raw cashews, soaked for a couple of hours
• 12-14 oz firm tofu
• Juice of 1-2 lemons (enough to keep the blades in the bowl moving)
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1 Tbsp olive oil

This whole mess gets processed up in the food processor, and, if you are making something Italian-y, you can also add

• 1-2 tsp dried basil, or maybe
• a splash of apple cider vinegar

To give it some zing.



Important notes:

You have to use firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu to get the texture right, if you use silken tofu you end up with a delicious sauce, but not a fluffy ricotta replacement.

Mince the garlic before you add it to the workbowl, otherwise there's too much "stuff" for the blades to get through and you can end up with big chunks of garlic.

Ratatouille "Lasagna"

Okay!

Getting back into the routine of cooking after a crazy cross-country move has been very easy given the robust natural bounty of the Sacramento valley.

We recently played host to Liz's sister and I wanted to make something hearty and festive. I thought, hey, maybe a lasagna, but maybe lighten it up a little.

Liz had read about swapping out the noodles for zucchini, and I had some boss Japanese eggplants, and I thought, hey, ratatouille is pretty standard summer business, what if I layered it up with some tomato sauce and cashew-tofu ricotta and served it up in delicious layers.



I got some quick tomato sauce started in a pan by sauteing down

• 1/2 a small onion
• 1 carrot
• 2 stalks of celery, and
• 3 cloves of garlic, with
• a hearty dollop of olive oil.

I added

• 1 sprig of fresh thyme and
• 1 sprig of fresh rosemary and mixed in the contents of
• one 28-oz can of whole peeled tomatoes.

After this simmered for a while, I splashed in

• 1 to 1/2 oz dry vermouth

and hit it with the immersion blender.

This didn't seem to be enough sauce, so I added

• 1 8 oz can of tomato paste and
• a half-cup of water.

Next time I'll just make a double batch, and just deal with any leftover delicious sauce, oh no...



In the meantime, I stemmed and halved

• four Japanese eggplants

and set them in the steamer to soften. When they were ready, I sliced them into strips along with

• about five smallish zucchinis.

I chopped up a handful of kalamata olives I found in the fridge and food-processed up

• 1 batch of cashew-tofu ricotta, (recipe forthcoming).

Then, I set the oven to 400 and started layering in a 9-inch by 13-inch pan.







Sauce, then eggplant, then zucchini, then tofu, then some olives and a sprinkle of nutritional yeast. Repeat these layers once and top with whatever tomato sauce you have left. Bake, covered with foil, at 400, until the zucchini is soft, and then uncovered for about 15 minutes.

It turned out great!

Sweet Potato "Lasagna"

I was pondering some kind of baked, easy-to-reheat casserole situation for Liz to eat while I was out of town, while I was taking stock of the contents of the kitchen cabinets.

A jar of marinara sauce got me thinking about lasagna. I could make up a little cashew-tofu ricotta, maybe brown some mushrooms, that sounds good. Yeah.

Okay, dude, but you don't have any lasagna noodles. Okay, well, I've made a lasagna-like layered casserole with potatoes before, do I have any potatoes?

Well, you've got some sweet potatoes. And those would be a healthier option than white potatoes. Maybe this might come together into something real, here.

It's good, but I might not even use the L word to describe it. Let's call it a multilayer sweet potato marinara casserole, I guess.



To that effect, I rubbed seven smallish garnets with oil, baked them, let them cool, and then peeled and sliced them.

I also sliced ten fat white mushrooms into quarter-inch slices. I was contemplating some skinnier slices, but I decided I wanted a meatier bite. I cooked these with a splash of oil until I got a real good mahogany sear.



Ingredients:

• seven baked, peeled, sliced sweet potatoes
• about 15-20 oz sliced button mushrooms, seared in oil
• fist-sized ball of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
• 26 oz jar of marinara ( I used Trader Joe's)

I also made a batch of cashew-tofu "ricotta" by food processing:

• 12 oz extra-firm tofu
• 1/2 cup soaked raw almonds
• 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• capful of apple cider vinegar
• splash of water
• salt and pepper to taste

Get a nine by thirteen glass pan and set your oven to 350.

Later any way that makes you happy, but I put a dollop of sauce on the bottom of the pan, then a layer of potato slices,



then half the ricotta, then the mushrooms and parsley.



Repeat these layers until you run out of ingredients, then arrange any remaining sweet potato slices as attractively as possible on the top of the casserole.



I sprinkled mine with a couple heavy pinches of almond parmezan, and then slid it into the oven.

Bake 15 minutes covered with foil, and then 15 minutes uncovered.



If I'd had some spinach, frozen or otherwise, that would have been a welcome addition, but I think it turned out pretty great anyway.

Potato, Olive and Caper Pizza with Silken Tofu Sauce

Halfway through a lazy Saturday and a glass of iced tea on the porch, we started brainstorming some dinner ideas.

It went like this: "hey, what about pizza" - "okay, yes."

Brainstorming complete, we conceived of a pizza pie in our heads and set about to the task.

I had been leafing through How to Cook Everything Vegetarian because I have a recurring dream where Mark Bittman and I are stranded on an island together and we make earnest-yet-wry observations about everything. Like, maybe we'll eat a couple of these coconuts. Maybe a couple of coconuts would be nice.

Anyway, in the pizza section, I read: you can just put silken tofu on a pizza.

Memories of a tasty tofu-based artichoke dip burbled up, and my pizza muse sang true and clear: a singular vision of a pizza sauce, complete and savory appeared, as if in a dream.

We got our dough ready: Pizza dough is super unforgiving if you are not some kind of weird Napolitana fetishist.



I like to proof about a tablespoon of yeast (which I get in big Red Star bricks from Costco for some negligible price) in a cup of water as hot as my faucet can make it with a tablespoon of sugar. I use organic, certified vegan, carbon-neutral unrefined evaporated cane juice because of guilt issues that are best left unexamined.

You whisk this all together with a cup of bread flour (I use Gold Medal All Trumps, again, from Costco), and then go watch the first twenty minutes of an episode of The Closer with your wife.



When it burbles up, then stir in a hefty pinch of salt and a hearty glug of olive oil and stir with a dough whisk. This is a transformative piece of kitchen equipment for me - I am overly skeptical when it comes to kitchen devices, but this is like, the best six dollars you're ever going to spend on a kitchen tool.

Eventually, you're going to have around two and a half cups of flour in that cup of water, but the amount of flour you add depends on the heat, humidity, phases of moon, etc., so add a cup of flour, stir, then add a quarter cup of flour, stir, and then knead in the flour a couple of tablespoons at a time until it's smooth and wonderful.



Set this aside in a warm bowl swirled with the smallest drop of oil you can manage to pour out of your economy-sized Costco bottle of extra virgin olive oil.

In two hours, you've got dough; make a pizza with it.

Meanwhile, I simmered a couple of yukon gold potatoes in water until they were tender, and set them aside to cool.

When it's pizza time in the P.M., turn your oven on as hot as it will go (likely 500 F).

I used to have an unglazed quarry tile like a total bread snob, but I've become addled in my old age and anyway it cracked and I can't find one at the hardware store here so whatever, I use a pizza pan.

Spray on some cooking spray, dust with cornmeal and set aside.

I sliced up some black olives, spooned out some capers, and sliced up the potatoes.

Next: the sawse.

• 1 block soft silken tofu
• 2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
• pinch red chile flakes
• hefty pinch oregano
• tsp garlic powder
• tsp onion powder (I use toasted granulated from Penzey's)
• 8-13 grinds black pepper
• hefty pinch salt (to taste)
• handful of flat-leaf parsley
• glug of olive oil

whiz this up in the food processor.



Okay, so, you stretch out a pie, shmear on half of this mixture, top with toppings, sprinkle with thyme, pepper, and salt, and bake for 10-12 minutes, or until golden brown and delicious. Pull it out, slice it, and sprinkle with some walnut parmezan.



It was incredible.

Stir-Fried Green Beans with Tofu Cutlets

My sojourn through the cookbook collection that inspired last week's stir-fry led to another adventure in wok cooking.

I picked up some reasonably priced green beans at the international grocery store, and that triggered a memory of a recipe from my copy of of Chinese Cooking, from the Time-Life Foods of the World collection.

It seemed easy enough, so to make the evening more complicated, I also cooked up some tofu cutlets inspired by everydaydish.tv.

So I sliced a block of frozen/thawed extra-firm tofu and marinated it in some soy sauce, water, nutritional yeast, and sage. Usually when you freeze tofu and then thaw it out, it gets spongy and firms up a little.

If you are a lazy cook, like me, you might try to get away with just freezing a whole block of it in the package without carefully draining out all the water to avoid big ice crystals from wreaking havoc on the interior.

This time, it turned out a little mushy. The flavor was good, and of course the crunchy-fried breading turned out good, but next time I make cutlets I'm just gonna use tofu straight out of the box.



I sliced up a pound of green beans into two-inch hunks, opened a can of sliced water chestnuts, soaked and sliced my last three dried brown Chinese mushrooms, and mixed up a little corn starch slurry - just a teaspoon.



While the vegetables were getting excited, I dredged the tofu slices in a mixture of one part nutritional yeast to three parts white whole wheat flour with a heavy pinch of salt, and then sizzled them in a pan with some sunflower oil until they were golden brown and delicious.



Because stir-frying is high-impact stuff, no images exist of the process, only the delicious conclusion: green beans and mushrooms fried for two minutes, then seasoned with a little sugar, fried for two more minutes, then deglazed with a splash of stock and stirred with the water chestnuts, then combined with the corn starch slurry and stirred until glossy and magnificent.

It turned out to be a pretty good way of cooking green beans - as a result of my unusual childhood, I can really only enjoy green beans when they are just crisp-tender, and stir-frying is a super-easy way to achieve this prized texture.

Next time I would try it with different mushrooms, maybe canned straw mushrooms, or even some fresh oyster mushrooms (although I might just eat those by themselves, in the dark, off of a gold plate, in some kind of special oyster-mushroom-eating room).



I plated a couple slices of tofu with some beans and drizzled with sriracha.

Tofu Stir Fry with Buckwheat

On Monday night I was thinking stir fry because I had a head of bok choy in the refrigerator. I chopped up four ribs, scrounged up a bell pepper, some scallions, an onion, and some cloves of garlic, and set out in search of some ingredients for a sauce.



I mixed a half-cup of soy sauce with two ounces of michiu and and the last tablespoon from a container of chogochujang I bought on a whim. I whisked in a tablespoon of corn starch and a tablespoon of sesame oil.

I was this close to putting some white rice in the cooker when I remembered that I had found some totally boss organic buckwheat groats in the natural foods aisle of my conventional grocery store. They cooked up to be as hearty and delicious as I imagined.



While considering the addition of some firm tofu, I remembered something about a package of extra-firm being somewhere in the building. Success! I like the dense texture and snap of extra-firm tofu, and it seemed well suited to being triangled and stir-fried with everything else.

Mushroom Gravy

We were looking for something hearty and wintery at the end of March because it was still raining and cold outside, and I also had a bunch of mushrooms that we needed to eat before leaving town, so I thought hey, mushroom gravy.

There's some contention in the household over whether or not mushroom gravy constitutes a center of the plate per se: the theory behind mushroom gravy is that the umami and deep flavors from caramelized mushrooms and onions will transform even the most pedestrian of starches and liquids into something magical.

I think of it as mushrooms in gravy, but I can understand how some would consider it merely a sauce.

To that extent we settled on some steamed broccoli florets and tofu cutlets. I made what I felt was a pretty convincing argument for mashed potatoes but I was persuaded to roast them instead.



I started sweating a medium yellow onion and about 12-17 criminis in olive oil. Properly done, this takes a while, so I scrubbed, wedged, oiled, and seasoned six russets and got them roasting.



Keeping an eye on the mushrooms, I got some water boiling for steaming, cut the florets from two heads of broccoli and sliced a block of tofu into eight slabs. These slabs got salt and pepper on both sides and went into shimmering margarine for eight-ish minutes a side, or until golden brown.



When the tofu is all cooked, and the oven fries are all roasted, and the broccoli is approaching crisp-tenderness, it is time to transform our mushrooms into mushroom gravy.

Since I didn't have any stock on hand, I whisked a pretty hefty tablespoon each of (organic white whole wheat etc) pastry flour and nutritional yeast into a quarter-cup of soy sauce and a half-cup of water. With this ready, I deglazed the pan with two ounces of dry vermouth. When all the sticky bits were moving again, in goes the flour-and-water mixture.



This gets brought to a boil and then down to a simmer. Maybe a taste. Does it maybe need a dash of Frank's Red Hot Sauce? Yes, yes it does.

Plate up two slices of tofu and a handful each of wedges and florets. Smother with delicious, delicious gravy.