The Ones that Got Away

If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that things don't quite add up on this blog. We have covered five recipes from the New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone here. However, my last post mentioned that I have already made eight recipes. Lest you think I'm trying to pull a fast one (and I wouldn't blame you for thinking that, seeing as I have 1,503 recipes to get through), I can assure you that I have in fact made all eight recipes. Actually, now I have made nine. Lets take a moment to recap, shall we?

Three of these recipes have no or limited pictures, because I hadn't had the idea of starting a blog when I made them. The three recipes that slipped under the radar were Olive Paste (pg 78), Glazed Sunflower Seeds with Shichimi Togashi (pg 80), and Smoked Chili Salsa (pg 63). Also, the morning after I stayed up until 11:00 counting recipes and blogging about it, I made **drumroll** Scrambled Eggs (pg 500). Yes, Madison does include a recipe for scrambled egg. Yes, it's as easy as it sounds. Yes, it TOTALLY counts toward my 1,503 recipe total. Just so we're clear.

The Olive Paste recipe was a smashing success. It's a fabulous condiment that will apparently store in the fridge indefinitely. We used it on mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwiches. It was DELICIOUS! The olive paste added a wonderful layer of salty umami to the sandwich, and turned it from something good but ordinary into something really special. I will be looking for lots of uses for my olive paste from now on.

The Glazed Sunflower Seeds with Shichimi Togashi were going to be used in another of Madison's recipes: the Kale Salad with Cider Vinegar. However, I was very rushed when I was making the salad, and I took a number of shortcuts. My version was just OK, but I know I left out some key ingredients. I will be attempting this salad again. The seeds, however, turned out very well! They were amazingly easy to make, and had lots of flavor considering how few ingredients were involved. These seeds would be a welcome addition to any salad, and without the Shichimi Togashi (which is optional anyway), they are quite versatile indeed!

The Smoked Chili Salsa is officially my husband's new favorite food. He's a bit of a spice fiend, and this condiment is not lacking in the spice department. I like the flavor well enough, but it's too hot for me. Paul, on the other hand, has been putting it on everything. He even dabbed it onto his French Toast the other morning. I was nearly sick. It wasn't really designed for French Toast. It was, however, designed for things like eggs and quesadillas. Thankfully the recipe makes an entire quart of salsa, otherwise I would probably have to make this at least once a week.

Finally, the scrambled eggs. I have pictures of these, because what's a blog without pictures? These eggs are basic, no frills, no surprises. The frills and surprises will come in the variations that follow. This recipe did contain a nugget of kitchen wisdom. Madison specified cooking the eggs slowly over low heat. I usually cook my eggs quickly over high heat while I'm doing five other things. As a result, my eggs brown on the bottom and have a rubbery texture. By cooking these over low heat and stirring them regularly, they ended up with a pillowy, velvety texture and a nice clean flavor. Go figure, you learn something new every day!

Farm eggs sourced locally will provide the best flavor for this simple dish.

Butter, not olive oil, always. Eggs need butter. Or bacon grease.

Beautiful fluffiness, no brown.

Add Smoky Chili Salsa if you dare.

***Disclaimer: All representations of Deborah Madison's recipes on this blog are intentionally incomplete. Do not attempt to copy a recipe from this blog. I have intentionally left out critical steps and ingredients to avoid copyright infringement. All recipes should only be attempted when referencing the book in which they were originally published.***

1,503

I finished counting.

There are 1,503 recipes in The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, as I've counted them. As stated in a previous post, the counting is subjective. Some people could conceivably count more, some could count fewer. I counted 1,503.

I've made eight, leaving only 1,495 more to go!

Bring it on.

Hummus, Crudités, and Other Fancy Things

My husband and I moved to our little corner of Iowa so that he could begin his parish ministry just over a year ago. (Has it been that long!?) Given my love for cooking and entertaining, and given the fact that we knew absolutely no one, we set out on a lofty mission: to have every single church member over for dinner at our house. Fortunately we didn't set ourselves a timeline. However, we weren't exactly planning to move at the snail's pace of 12 people a year. That's six couples. Six dinners. In an entire year. Things happen, ya know. So yeah, 12 people down and only ~88 more to go.

Now that school is looming only three weeks away, we've decided to get a little more serious about this entertaining business! We entertained two different nights this week, back to back! As a result, I needed some food options that would work equally well with the two different meals each night. The food could not reveal that it had been served before, and needed to be as fresh the second night as it was the first. In other words, pies and hot dishes (two of my favorite things) were out.

The first night I served a vegetable hodge podge; it was an ecclectic array of everything currently growing in my garden. The second night, I wanted to show case a marvelous pear chutney, so I went with pork chops topped with the chutney...... surrounded by a hodge podge of garden vegetables. I was able to re-use three things: sliced watermelon, hummus from New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (NVCE), and a fun little dessert mousse served in individual glasses that I found in a different cookbook.

The hummus went particularly well with cut up veggie sticks. The first night, I served these as part of the meal. The second evening, I used Deborah Madison's suggestion and served them as crudités. Crudité is a very fancy French word for "cut up raw vegetables."  It definitely sounds better in French. Crudités are served as appetizers along with nuts and dips. I decided to get my fancy French on and go for it. I practiced saying "crudité" in my best French accent all afternoon before the meal. My line was going to be "Welcome! Dinner will be just a minute, but please help yourself to some crudités. Would you care for a glass of Chenin Blanc?" I wanted it to sound cultured but casual, and not too pretentious. It needed to be innocently snobby. The whole thing was very meta. As soon as the guests walked in the door, I greeted them, pointed to the appetizer, and blurted out "There's some chopped up veggies over there, help yourself! Do you like white wine?" It was probably better that way...

The crudités and hummus were a huge hit. I actually had a hummus recipe before I tried Deborah Madison's version. I like hers better, and won't be going back.

Madison calls her hummus "Spicy Chickpea Puree," and it can be found on page 87 of NVCE. I've noticed this about Madison's book. She sometimes (but certainly not always) renames classic preparations of ethnic dishes to their constituent parts. She calls hummus a chickpea puree, and tzatziki is "Cucumber Yogurt Sauce". Borsch is simply "Beet Soup." It is a bit throwing.

You will also see pictured the "Salted Almonds," from page 79. I made these for the appetizer platter. They had a lovely roasted flavor, but the salt did not stick well at all. I used kosher salt, which was one of the options given in NVCE. If I make them again I might try sea salt.

Tahini is the most important secret ingredient in any good hummus. Tahini is like peanut butter, but made with sesame seeds instead of peanuts. I get mine from Amazon, because they've never even heard of such a thing in my small town grocery.

Combine all the ingredients

And give it a whirl! So pretty... Remember, hummus is one of those forgiving foods that can be adjusted to taste. So make sure you have a bag of chips nearby and do plenty of tasting as you go!

My lovely snooty crudité platter

What a way to start the evening off right

***Disclaimer: All representations of Deborah Madison's recipes on this blog are intentionally incomplete. Do not attempt to copy a recipe from this blog. I have intentionally left out critical steps and ingredients to avoid copyright infringement. All recipes should only be attempted when referencing the book in which they were originally published.***

Roasted Beets on a Rainy Day

Here we are, at the beginning of a journey. Well, at the beginning of several new journeys for me! Apparently, I'm the kind of person who copes with major life change by piling on more new projects and commitments. Because moving away from my husband, dog, garden, and community to attend graduate school as a *somewhat* non-traditional student while living in a small apartment with two perfect strangers felt rather underachieving, I have also decided to cook my way through The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison, and to blog about it. We wouldn't want life to start getting boring, after all. It was actually my lovely husband, Paul, who gifted me the book several weeks ago for my birthday. He likely calculated that he would only have to tolerate 5 weeks of enthusiastic vegetarian cooking before I would be safely off to school, out of the kitchen, and he would be free to resume eating meat at least three times a day. His calculations were correct, but I am making the most of what little time I have. Not only has my carnivorous husband been forced into a vegetarian existence, but every friend and neighbor who has joined us for dinner has been treated to a meatless meal as well. No one has complained. Well, Paul may have complained once or twice.

I love to cook. Five years ago, when Paul and I were first married, I barely knew how to boil water. However, I developed a passion for cooking almost instantly, and my skills in the kitchen have evolved substantially. I have most of the basic principles and techniques of cooking under my belt, but now I want to take my culinary skills to the next level. I want to be able to cook intuitively. I want to be able to take a bunch of ingredients and with no recipe, turn them into something spectacular. I want to understand how flavor works. That is why I have decided to cook a book. (That phrase makes me imagine dicing up a hardbound book and gently stirring it in to a pot of boiling water. ...Am I the only one who gets that thought picture?)

Anywho, many well known chefs, including Alice Waters, Jaques Pepin, and Mark Bittman, claim that cooking a book was vital to their culinary development. I have chosen the New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone because it is one of the current definitive works on cooking vegetables. Deborah Madison cooked at Chez Panisse early in her career, which means she is well qualified to write about cooking seasonally, simply, and flavorfully.  Here is a fact: if you want flavor, you want vegetables. Meat is satisfying and savory, but it doesn't bring a whole lot to the table in terms of flavor. Would you care to eat a plain steamed chicken breast, seasoned with nothing but a little salt? I wouldn't. Would you care to eat some plain steamed fresh broccoli, seasoned with nothing but a little salt? Sign me up! I want to learn about flavors, which means I want to learn about herbs and spices, fruits and vegetables. Adding meat is secondary.

My plan is to cook every recipe in Deborah Madison's revised tome. And believe me, it is a tome. I haven't finished counting the recipes yet, but I'll let you know when I do. Right now I've counted up to 608, and I'm only on page 271 out of 649. The recipes themselves are not numbered, and different people could conceivably count them differently. Beneath many of her recipes, Ms Madison has included different variations on the same theme. Some of these variations depart significantly from the original dish, enough to make them two truly separate recipes. Other variations only differ by one ingredient. I have counted each variation as a separate recipe. The ones that are dramatically different deserve to be tried and tested individually. The recipes that suggest only the addition of a little cheese here or an avocado there are still counted separately, but I will probably make them simultaneously. We'll see how it goes. The numbering is subjective, but there is a method to my madness. One way or another, I will cook through this entire book. Hopefully, the process will be informative, and a lot of fun!

I would love it if you would join me. I will post on here each time I complete a meal that used one or more of Deborah Madison's recipes. If you feel so inspired, you can make the meal yourself and tell me about it! However, I will not be posting any recipes from "The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (NVCE)" here. If I post a recipe it will be my own or will be borrowed from another source. If you want to cook along, please buy this treasure trove of cooking wisdom for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

And now, for the starting meal!

I made this yesterday while the sky was falling. The plan had been to pick the ingredient for this meal out of my garden right before I used them. That was a wonderful plan... until a line of severe storms blew through right as it was time to make lunch. Because I had no back up plan to speak of, I still picked my ingredients out of the garden, but I got very wet doing it...

I made three recipes out of NVCE for this meal: Roasted Beets, Apples, and Onions with Cider Vinegar (pg 305), Braised Carrots (pg 315), and Mustard Butter (pg 46).

The roasted beets were my choice for the main course. The truth is, we are swimming in beets. This is my first year gardening, and I sowed my seeds under the basic assumption that 90% of my crop was doomed to certain failure. Imagine my surprise when almost every plant survived! (At least, so far...) I did not loose a single beet, which means we are swimming in beets. We have had beet sandwiches, pickled beets, beet hamburgers, beet jelly, and beet cake. I could almost swear we are turning a shade of magenta. I've given bags of beets to my friends, and used them to barter for veggies that have not flourished so well in my beginner's garden. And still we are overrun with beets. Deborah Madison's recipe calls for four beets. I was sold.

So I steamed my beets, and diced up all the fruits and veggies.

Then added the goodies.

And stuck it in the oven, dotted with plenty of butter, of course! This dish does not make perfect sense for the middle of July, due to the long baking time. However, for a coolish rainy day when one is swimming in beets, it works just fine...

The dish turned out very well! The flavors melded together wonderfully, and as Deborah Madison promised, the dish was truly better than the sum of its parts.

This recipe made quite a lot of food. I chilled the extras and brought them to a potluck lunch the next day. No one suspected they were eating leftovers! I think I liked the chilled dish even better. Of course my preference could be seasonal; it is July after all.

The braised carrots were a lovely side to the beets. I risk being thrown out of the crunchy, hippy, gardening community for admitting this, but I don't much care for the taste of fresh garden carrots.

They are soooo strongly flavored. I find them overpowering after a lifetime of eating mild (anemic) grocery store (old) carrots. However, the garden has been producing its fair share of carrots, so something had to be done. This recipe was the answer.

After scrubbing the carrots (garden carrots should be scrubbed rather than peeled), I cut them into pretty little ovals.

Garden carrots cut into nice ovals

Next, I prepared the braise in a sauce pan, added the carrots, and cooked until delicious.

Finally, I mixed up a compound butter with herbs from the garden and mustard. We spread that on toasted French bread to enjoy with our meal. All around it was a lovely meal for a rainy day.

***Disclaimer: All representations of Deborah Madison's recipes on this blog are intentionally incomplete. Do not attempt to copy a recipe from this blog. I have intentionally left out critical steps and ingredients to avoid copyright infringement. All recipes should only be attempted when referencing the book in which they were originally published.***