Sarah's Sexy (Sometimes) Sunday Bread Bake

Okay, okayyyy, as lucky as I am to live with folks who are always making delicious goodness, I can't leech off of them all the time. Y'all got me; I'm guilted into ever-so-occasional productivity. Time to look busy.

Say, what the heck is this doing in Marge's cookbook drawer? Nobody bakes bread any more. Who kneads it? [rimshot]

This basic recipe starts with a "sponge." Hmmm. Why would I start bread with a gnarly sponge, especially one that photographs with this weirdie green hue? It's making me feel ill to look at it.

The dough still photographs green after kneading. Maybe it's because it took a cup and a half more flour this time than the recipe calls for. Maybe whole wheat flour turns you green. Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West was actually vegan and loved to snack on flour late at night, making her highly soluble when that pesky Dorothy showed up with a bucket of water.

Whoa, my questionably tasty bread dough is multiplying like rabbits. Or like cancer. No one should joke about cancer. This is just a very minor, highly curable cancer with nommy side symptoms.

Final rise leaves many questions unanswered. How many pans are under that towel? Can anything worth eating possibly come out from under that grease stained rag? Hey, does the kitchen smell like gas to you, and did the pilot light in the oven go out? (The answer to that last one turned out to be "yes," but we triumphed through the power of internet forums, a long tapered candle, and sheer boldness.)

O well, guess we'll never know.

CSA Haul

Every week, we make a Sunday-morning journey to the Hollywood Farmers Market to pick up a CSA basket from our friendly neighborhood CSA, South Central Farmers.  A CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm typically sells shares of their weekly produce harvest rather than selling individual vegetables.  For $20, we get a big box full of whatever South Central happened to pull out of the ground that week.

It's really fun to see how the selection of vegetables changes slowly throughout the year.  Plus, when you have a ton of local, seasonal vegetables in the fridge it makes it a lot easier to remember to eat seasonally.  After you've been doing it for a few years, you just start to associate particular months with particular vegetables.  Though I have to say, living in Los Angeles makes that a little crazy.  For instance, we were getting peppers well into December, whereas up north in Davis pepper season stops in mid September.

Anyway, we got a ton of delicious shit in our CSA basket this week, including but not limited to: celery, romaine lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, kohlrabi, red onion, chard, several different kinds of kale, oranges, lemons, and green cabbage.  Oh yeah, and we bought some Brussels sprouts at the farmers' market too because we just couldn't resist.

The cabbage has already been sauerkrauted and we made tofu dill salad lettuce-wraps with some of the romaine, but I'm not sure what we're going to do with the rest of it.  I'm just glad we're not getting turnips and parsley anymore because we still have a ton of that in the fridge from last week.

Vegan Brownies are Salad Too

Sometimes you just get hit by a sugar craving on a Saturday night.  Last night we decided that shortbread cookies were a little too fancy and out-of-reach, even though we had all of the ingredients.  Instead, we decided to go with an old-fashioned American favorite: the chocolate brownie.  Except we were rolling vegan-style.

Our favorite brownie recipe comes from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  Strangely, it starts out with some silken tofu in a blender and creates a creamy white sugary delicious mess.

Since we didn't really think this culinary adventure through, part-way into the recipe we realized that we didn't have enough cocoa powder to make it all the way to 1/2 a cup.  Instead, we decided to substitute some plain dark chocolate we had in the cabinet from our last trip to The Candy House in Davis.  Some random website suggested that we substitute 1 oz of chocolate for 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder.

 The chocolate mixed in pretty well and gave the batter an amazing texture.  It was hard to stop eating it long enough to stick it in the oven.  While we were waiting on our main course to finish baking, we decided to use up some our lettuce mountain.  Lately our CSA has been producing crazy quantities of gorgeous romaine and red-leaf lettuce - so much so that it's been a challenge for us to consume it all.  We put some of it to good use by making lettuce wraps with hummus, grilled veggies, and a precious out-of-season red bell pepper that we scored at Trader Joes.

 The lettuce wraps were a welcome diversion to distract us from the sweet, chocolately smell that was invading our kitchen via the oven.  In our house, we have a saying that vegan desserts are pretty much the same thing as salad.  Because they're both just made of plants... right?  So they're both good for you!  As we see it, this is a little salad-wrap appetizer for our main-dish salad.

Aww yeah... show me the inside!

After we were done with our appetizer-salad, we pulled our entree-salad out of the oven and tried our best not to eat all of it before the night was through.

Don't worry - there was at least a little salad left over for breakfast ;)

Vegetable Stock Becomes Hummus

Making vegetable stock is easy and can form the flavor base for other cooking projects.  I like to save vegetable cuttings (potato skins, onion parts, carrot greens and the like) in a bin in the freezer, then make vegetable stock every week or two. You can use most vegetable remains, so long as you don't add any brassicas (think cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, etc).  A good rule of thumb is that if it tastes bitter when eaten raw, keep it out of your stock.

Just dump the frozen vegetable bits into a crock pot and cover with water. Throw in a bay leaf, maybe a clove or garlic or some black pepper if you want.  Cook overnight or even for 24 hours.

The stock makes a great cooking liquid.  I like to use it for beans, because I can just strain out the vegetable pieces and add dried beans and use the crock pot again without having to clean it.  This time I cooked chickpeas.

But once you make a bunch of chickpeas, it's only a matter of time before someone turns them into humus!

Brussels Sprouts

They're wee little cabbages that grow on a stick!

Buckets!

We've enjoyed the fruits of a lot of home fermentation in the past few months, including delicious pickles and sauerkraut. But we're hoping to expand our operation to include kimchi, miso, tempeh, water kefir, kombucha, and even more sauerkraut. Right now all of our fermentation vessels are occupied with sauerkraut in varying stages of done-ness, which is putting a severe cramp in our lacto-fermented style.

Over the weekend a friend gave me a tip: ask restaurants for their surplus food-grade buckets. A lot of restaurants buy ingredients that come in buckets, but don't have a use for the buckets themselves. So they are happy to give them away. Well, today while buying a sandwich over lunch, I made a major bucket score at Sub King. Thanks Kelly, for the sandwich and the buckets!!!

Hot Dogs for Dinner!

Veal wieners from the market for some, vegan apple sage seitan sausages for most, and all with homemade buns, sauerkraut, and fries. Delicious!

Makin' Kraut!

Sauerkraut is easy to make and great in sandwiches or with potatoes. Since our weekly CSA box has been bringing giant heads of cabbage lately, we're making tons of delicious sauerkraut.

Just shred any cabbage and pack tightly into a ceramic or glass vessel, while adding generous pinches of salt between the layers. Add a little sauerkraut to the top, then put a plate on top and add a heavy weight; a jar filled with water usually works. Let the whole thing ferment in an out-of-the-way spot in your kitchen for 4-6 weeks.  If the cabbage doesn't provide enough moisture to cover within a day or  two, add enough brine to completely submerge the cabbage. To make brine, mix 1 tbsp of non-iodine salt with one cup of water.

For more information on how easy making fermented foods can be, check out Wild Fermentation.