Autumn (the best season, and make no mistake) is on its way.
I have proof.
Or rather, I had proof. But, because I am basically a LOLcat at heart, I eated it. Nom!
The first Mellocreme Pumpkin of the season has been et. Bring on the Autumn!
Fez is ready. She is practicing her hibernation skills with the dog’s squeaky stuffed hedgehog.
Y’all know about the Schadenfreude carnival that is the Cake Wrecks blog, right? No? Well, now you do.
Upon discovering my dairy allergy, one of the categories of things that immediately vanished from my food options was the category of the creamy dip or dressing. Mayonnaise, of course, was still an option, as were creamy-textured dips and dressings that had a mayonnaise base, since mayonnaise is an egg emulsion and not made with dairy products. But since it is frequently impossible to tell visually whether a dressing or dip that one is served at a restaurant or party is exclusively mayonnaise-based or whether it is dairy-based or as is often the case, made of some combination of dairy and mayonnaise, I quickly learned to just avoid anything that looked creamy.
This wasn’t a huge problem. I’d never been devoted to creamy dressings and dips. Then again I certainly had been known to enjoy roquefort or ranch salad dressings now and then, and once or twice a year would get a horrifyingly intense jones for the Lipton onion soup sour-cream-and-onion chip dip and would eat a whole pint of it over the course of a couple of days. It didn’t seem like so much to give up. Still, not having the creamy-dip/dressing option got annoying after a while, particularly after I started to realize just how many vinaigrette-style prepared salad dressings also contained ingredients I couldn’t eat, most commonly in the form of small amounts of cheese.
Oh, I know from vinaigrettes and egg-based dressings, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been making my own salad dressings on a fairly regular basis for years. I can coddle an egg or two for a Caesar salad with the best of them (I just leave out the parmesan, and add extra anchovies). But… well… sometimes you want something with a nice creamy mouthfeel. And you don’t necessarily feel like being bothered to coddle eggs to get it.
Enter Hollyhock Dressing. The recipe was given to me by my wonderful friend and darned good cook, Liza, who warned me, not a bit hyperbolically as it turns out, that the stuff is addictive. It really is. Hollyhock dressing is fantastic stuff. It’s garlicky. It’s savory. It’s vegan. It keeps well. It’s easy to make, providing you’ve got a blender. And it’s creamy.
Seriously, this stuff is so good that I rarely make less than a double batch at a time. Often, I make a triple batch.
The ingredients are simple and few.
For a single batch, you will require:
The method, likewise, is a complete and utter cakewalk:
Whiz the liquid ingredients together in your blender with the garlic until the mixture is as smooth as you can get it. Add the nutritional yeast in thirds, whizzing it together in the blender each time, and scraping down the walls of the blender jar after each blending. At the end, blend the mixture for an additional minute or so, just to make sure everything is completely combined and completely smooth.
Note: if you make a double or triple batch, make each batch separately in the blender, to avoid overloading your blender jar. Pour them out into a large bowl and stir them together as you finish blending the batches, to ensure a uniform consistency and taste.
Store, refrigerated and covered, for 3-4 hours before serving, or preferably overnight. Let come back up to room temperature before you serve it, as the olive oil will thicken quite a bit when it’s cold.
One of the best things about Hollyhock Dressing is how versatile it is. It’s great on salad, of course, and brilliant as a dip for crudites. But it’s also a wonderful dip for hard-boiled eggs, and anything you might be prone to dip into aioli or anchoiade you can certainly dip into this, a list which very much includes good crusty bread. Additionally, Hollyhock Dressing has an amazing affinity for potatoes. Pour it over your baked potatoes, or, if you want your mouth to think it died and went to heaven, use it instead of butter/margarine/milk/faux-milk in your mashed potatoes.
Try it. You can thank me later. Or better yet, thank Liza, who gave me the recipe and thus brought great joy into my culinary life… and made it commonplace for my Belovedary, not normally much given to salad-eating, to request a big plate of salad with his supper.
I told you it was good.
(Full disclosure: This photo is of the salad I had for lunch… mixed greens (several lettuces, rocket, parsley, a couple kinds of basil) plus Corno di Toro pepper and two sliced Brandywine tomatoes. My Belovedary, poor thing, is allergic to raw tomatoes, so this is categorically Not His Salad.)
As a FYI, and in hopes of getting this news out to people who will be interested, I should note that I am currently accepting applications for research interns for the 2008-2009 academic year.
My current projects deal with two general topics, 1) the history of the concept of heterosexuality and 2) the sexual politics of domestic labor and housekeeping… in case anyone needs to know in order to consider applying for the internships.
All the information one needs in order to apply is on a handy-dandy web page right over here.
Please feel free to forward the URL and information, and thank you for your interest and your help.
– Hanne
p.s. Just so this post has a little bit of food-related content, I will note that geographically local interns stand a pretty good chance of being invited to dinner periodically…
For the past two weeks, I have been without an oven. A severe lightning storm that managed to set fire to the steeple and roof of a church a couple of blocks from me also managed to fry the digital control panel of my gas oven, leading me to wonder just what the Whirlpool people were thinking when they decided to make a gas oven that was exclusively responsive to electronic controls.
(I have fantasies of the marketing meeting: “See, Barry, it’s the best of both worlds! All the benefits of a gas oven, but with the whole-household protection of an electric that can’t be used during a power outage! I mean, it’s dangerous for people to have brownies during an electrical storm, everybody knows that. I know, I know what you’re going to say. Some people might want to be able to use their oven if the lights go out. But lightning is attracted to baked goods. Everybody knows that. Didn’t you see the news last year? That whole family in Nashua that got burned to a crisp because someone thought they were going to be so smart and bake snickerdoodles during that big rainstorm? I read it on the Internet, so it must be true. Trust me, we’re saving lives here, Barry.”)
In my state of no-bake, I have been unaccountably culinarily frustrated. It’s not that I’ve lacked things to cook, and interesting things at that. But you know how it is: you always want the one you cannot have, and so I have been yearning to make pies, and roasted beets/cauliflower/green beans, and baked eggplant for baba ghanoush, and, well, you get the picture. Even the weather was, for about a week, incredibly oven-use compliant, at least for this time of year, in that it was pleasantly breezy and in the 70s or low 80s.
Instead, for us and for the friends who ate with us during the past couple of weeks, I cooked a fairly typical round of Chinese dishes, interspersed with a bit of Western cookery for the hell of it. There was a meal of black bean pork and peppers, one of our standbys. There were lamb leg steaks and stir-fried mizuna. I steamed a whole fish, an incredibly satisfying and really very simple method of cooking fish that is always delicious and which I plan to photograph and write up the next time I do it. I made radish kimchee fried rice for myself one lunch, and for another I had vegetarian shakshouka (didn’t have any merguez). I comforted myself with breakfasts of long-cooked, slightly salty oatmeal drizzled with olive oil and, spooned over the top, a few tablespoons of ground pork sauteed with lots and lots of thinly-sliced onion. (Savory oats are the bomb). I even made spicy, oniony, garlicky blackeyed peas and rice with half of the gorgeous blackeyed peas I got fresh at the farmer’s market. And some hard-cooked eggs.
You wouldn’t think I would be able to still be cranky about my lack of oven with all that going on. But I kept thinking about everything I couldn’t make. Friends volunteered to let me use their oven, but I never quite got myself in gear to go do that. I just stared at my defunct oven and pouted, and daydreamed about the day –and I swear to you that it will come– that I finally have the space and the means and the house-I-plan-to-die-in and I acquire a huge siege engine of an Aga cooker (plus, of course, several restaurant-powered gas burners for the things one needs those for, like wok cooking), whereupon I will have not one but four, count ‘em, FOUR ovens at my beck and call.
Eric the Appliance Guy is coming to fix my oven tomorrow morning.
Truly, not a moment too soon.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m allergic to casein, the protein in milk. So I’ve had to work out some ways to achieve the same culinary effects one can get from milk products without poisoning myself.
This recipe for what I call Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce is one of my favorites, because it is one of the most successful texture and mouth-feel replicas of the comfort-food original that I’ve yet come up with . A sauce based on nutritional yeast will never taste like a cheese sauce, not really. But if it’s creamy, smooth, savory, a little salty, and rich, it definitely pushes all the right buttons. The flavor provided by the yeast and Marmite (a yeast product), plus garlic and onion and plenty of mustard, is perhaps not quite cheeselike but it’s not quite not cheeselike, either.
As a bonus, it’s vegan, so there’s no cholesterol to worry about. And all the yeast means it’s bursting at the seams with B vitamins. It will keep reasonably well, although it doesn’t reheat quite as gracefully, texture-wise, as dairy mac and cheese does. (Still tastes good, though.)
I like to pair Mac and Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce with a particularly bright and somewhat acidic side dish to help cut the richness. Today I made an impromptu cucumber and cilantro salad in a spicy Asian marinade.
Not Cheese, But Not Bad, Sauce
2 small onions, minced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced very fine
10 Tablespoons vegan margarine
1 cup unsweetened, unflavored faux-milk of your choice (I usually use almond), thinned with 1/2 cup hot water
2 Tablespoons prepared mustard
4 Tablespoons creamy-style almond butter, cashew butter, or tahini
1 Tablespoon Marmite
1 1/2 cups nutritional yeast
1 Tablespoon ground dry mustardMeasure out the nutritional yeast and ground dry mustard in a bowl, and stir to combine. Set aside.
Melt the vegan margarine in a saucepan and add the onions. Saute the onions in the margarine until they are transparent, then add the garlic. While the onions are cooking, stir together the faux-milk/water mixture, the prepared mustard, the nut butter or tahini, and the Marmite until thoroughly combined. After you have added the garlic to the hot fat and onions, let it cook for about a minute, then add the liquid and stir everything well. Reduce heat to barely a simmer.
Add yeast/mustard mixture to the liquid slowly, using a whisk to combine. Once all the yeast/mustard mixture is added, whisk over low heat for about 2 minutes, then remove from heat and let stand for 5 minutes, stirring once or twice.
This provides enough sauce for a pound of elbow macaroni. Cook the macaroni until it is quite well done, or it will absorb too much liquid from the sauce and the sauce will lose its texture. Reserve a quarter cup or so of the pasta cooking water when you drain the pasta, and add it back into the dish a tablespoon or so at a time if this begins to happen.
Serve hot with plenty of freshly-ground black pepper.
Note: if you don’t like the slight lumpiness introduced by the onions, feel free to omit them, but they do add some dimension to the taste that I enjoy.
I love a good marinated salad, and I also love the southeastern Chinese (and indeed, pan-southeast-Asian) combination of cucumbers and cilantro and chiles — it is bright and sprightly and summery and delightful. Although, yes, probably not a dish for those people to whom cilantro tastes of perfumed soap. Of whom I am not one. Which is why I like to make a salad that goes a little something like this…
Spicy Cucumber and Cilantro Salad
5 Kirby cucumbers, small Asian cucumbers, or other firm-fleshed variety with few seeds (if you must use another variety, consider removing the seeds so the dish won’t get watery), peeled and sliced about 1/4 inch thick
2 teaspoons kosher salt
3 cups cleaned and dried cilantro (coriander) leaves
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons Asian sesame oil
1 teaspoon Chinese chili paste (in oil) (or less if you do not care for a lot of heat)Sprinkle sliced cucumbers with the salt and toss with your hands to combine. Let stand 15 minutes, then rinse well in several changes of water, and drain well (use a salad spinner if you have one). Toss the cucumbers with the cilantro leaves and add the vinegar, sesame oil, and chili paste. Toss well to combine, cover, and refrigerate for an hour or so before serving.