I Was A Teenage Vegan CookBlog

I knows it’s been a little while since my last update, but don’t think that I’ve been merely resting on my Danish laurels (more like eating them, really); I’ve been a bit busy getting ready to move out of this dismal corner of Maryland, and now that it looks like I’ve found a nice place in scenic (and hipster-filled) Somerville (with a newly remodeled kitchen!) I can get back to the serious business of cookbloggery. I did actually do quite a bit of cooking yesterday - a woman I work with was clearing out her pantry and gave me a couple of mason jars filled with chocolate chip cookie mix (flour, sugar, etc.) and a whole bunch of dried beans and spices, respectively, topped off with some cutesy cloth straight out of Br’er Rabbit - but nothing worth writing home (or the internet, for that matter) about since I was really just combining pre-assembled ingredients in slightly different containers. I had to improvise with the soup a little bit since I didn’t actually have a Dutch oven (nor, until I consulted wikipedia, did I have a really solid idea of what one was), so I settled for a non-Dutch non-oven (a pot) and, due to size constraints, substituted one-and-a-half cups of water for 5. Needless to say it all came out surprisingly stewish. Well, except for the cookies. They’re about what I expected.

Now that I have enough food to last me for a week or two I thought I’d take this opportunity to post some old favorites of mine. With the springtime finally starting to resolve its cruel and usual April moodswings into a more pleasantly manic month of May, I’ve decided to start with a perennial warm-weather favorite: beer-battered barbecue tofu. The most pleasing part of this dish is its contrasts: chewy vs. crispy, sweet vs. spicy, animal vs. vegetable, east vs. west, man vs. machine, and so on. In all, it’s a perfectly non-pretentious meal to enjoy with friends, bros, boys, brosephs, buds, beers, and brewskies (or, in StrongBadia, “cold ones”).

Ingredients:

• Tofu
• 2 cups flour
• 12 oz. beer
• Assorted vegetables
• Vegetable oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 tsp. chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. chipotle chili powder
• 1 1/2 cups ketchup
• 1/2 cup vinegar
• 1 tbsp. lemon juice
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

Equipment: relatively deep frying pan (or deep-fryer), patriotism.

Music: Ho-Ag - The Word from Pluto

Instructions:

1. Prepare the barbecue sauce by sauteing the onion, garlic, and chili powders in a pan with 1 tbsp. of vegetable oil until brown, keeping the heat low enough to prevent the chipotle powder from turning into tear gas/pepper spray. Add all remaining ingredients and allow to simmer for 15 minutes, adding salt and pepper to taste.
2. Combine the flour and beer in a mixing bowl and stir until it reaches a pancake-batter-like consistency.
3. Fill a frying pan with oil to a depth of about 1/2 inch and heat it on high.
4. Cut the tofu into slices and dip them into the batter, then remove them and place them immediately in the frying pan. Cook them until both sides are crispy and brown.
5. Heat vegetables in a separate pan until seared.
6. Arrange tofu and vegetables on plates and drizzle with barbecue sauce.

Unfortunately, beer batter doesn’t hold up so well over the grill so this recipe doesn’t translate into outdoor cooking too smoothly, but if you cut the tofu into large (2″) cubes and prepare them as above then stick them on some skewers alongside a bunch of grilled vegetables you have a perfect meatless summer treat. You could even try undercooking them in the pan (just enough so that the batter forms a shell on the outside), then skewering them with the vegetables (not literally, more like “at the same time as” (but maybe sticking a carrot through them would work too)), basting them in barbecue sauce, and grilling them at the same time - I just can’t guarantee that they won’t burst into flame. Not that it wouldn’t be really cool if they did.

(This recipe is available in my most recent cookbook. Check out my posts below for information on where to find it, or look click on my profile for a link to download a printable version).

I was a feeling a little lazy when it came time to make dinner this evening, so I decided to take the easy route, which, as a bachelor (of the art and science of humanity) is, as the song goes, my prerogative. Look, all you lonely people, at where simple and nutritious meals come from. All you need is a can, a pan, and a plan (panama?). Having a few fresh vegetables to toss in wouldn’t hurt either.

Today I decided on lentil stew with carrots, celery, and onions (a classic vegetable combination), but the basic idea can be taken in multiple directions, from veggie chili with fresh bell peppers to curried chickpeas with potatoes, spinach, and tomatoes. Indeed, some variation on the bean and vegetable stew can be found in a variety of cuisines worldwide, such that the combinations thereof are limited only by your imagination, the contents of your spice rack, and the amount of time you have available for cooking. I’d be happy to provide instructions for making some of these dishes from scratch, but for the occasionally lazy, single, and easily satisfied among us the widespread availability and diversity of canned foods can be, on a day as windy, rainy, and unseasonably unpleasant as today, just the thing to keep us from resorting to cannibalism or idle and disconsolate snackery.

Ingredients:

• 1 can lentil soup
• 1 clove garlic, chopped
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cluster of celery, chopped
• 1 large amount of carrots, sliced
• miscellaneous spices
• salt and pepper
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• rice (optional)

Equipment: Cooking pot, cutting board, chef’s knife.

Music: Dog Faced Hermans - Those Deep Buds

Instructions:

1. Cook garlic and onion in a pot with vegetable oil over medium/high heat until they begin to brown. Reduce heat to medium and add carrots, celery, and spices and continue cooking until tender as a lover’s embrace.
2. Remove lentil soup from can and pour it into the pot (possibly together in one fell swoop) and allow to simmer until it reaches your Goldilockean mean temperature. Season as desired and serve over rice, or alongside whatever other form of carbohydrates happens to be at hand.

While I’m on the subject of seasoning, allow me to rant for a moment about the disturbing trend I’ve noticed among the finer vegan eateries, especially those in the New York City area: the lack of our otherwise culturally ubiquitous salt and pepper shakers. Now, I can understand health-conscious restauranteurs not wanting to contribute to the sodium intake of their customers, but witholding pepper? The only reasons I can think of are guilt by association, that providing pepper alone would make the absence of salt all the more conspicuous, or that it’s part of a vast soy sauce conspiracy. This wouldn’t be such a drastic problem if it wasn’t for the suspiciously cultivated blandness of a great deal of ostensibly healthy vegan food. Flavor is not the enemy, people. Vegan food has a bad enough reputation as it is, and this isn’t doing it any favors. Things can be good for you and still taste good. . . though, given that this is coming from someone whose tastebuds are notoriously inured to all manner of savory and spicy assaults, perhaps you should take my diatribe with a metaphorical grain of salt.

If it’s available, that is.

Over a recent reunion dinner at Quantum Leap, my longtime vegan friend Dan (that would be “Vegan Dan” as opposed to his fellows in nick-nominal appelation Bizarro Dan, Skinny Dan, and Mr. Wrinkly Pants) issued me the latest in an ongoing series of baking challenges: Vegan Raspberry Danish. Being, as has been mentioned previously, a great appreciator of pastry breakfasts (and no stranger to the throwing down of baking gauntlets), I accepted gladly. I am pleased to say that my experiments have met with almost unqualified success. The qualifiers are as follows:

1. Not much in the traditional recipe needs to be changed to make it vegan (butter to margarine, eggs to egg replacer, etc.), so my recipe is not noticably different save for the absense of “egg wash”, for which I couldn’t come up with a decent replacement, but which, unless you require you baked goods to shine with a slightly plasticene luster, is not actually necessary. Feel free to use all-purpose spray-on acrylic at your own discretion.
2. Preparing the dough correctly takes a lot of patience because you have to return it to refrigerator to keep the margarine from softening and blending in with the flour after every set of folds. This is not actually necessary either, as long as you’re ok with the end result being more scone-like than dane-esque.
3. Cardamom, though popular in Indian cuisine, is not often to be found 70 miles north of Washington D.C.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 1 envelope (1 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water
• 1/2 cup warm soymilk
• 2 measures egg replacer
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cardamom (if available)
• 1/2 tsp almond extract (optional)
• 3 1/2 cups flour
• 1 cup (2 sticks) cold margarine (unsalted, preferably)

Raspberry Filling:

• 10 oz. raspberries (fresh or frozen)
• 1 tbsp. sugar
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 2 tsp. cornstarch

Soy Cream Cheese Filling:

• 8 oz. soy cream cheese
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp soymilk
• 1/4 tsp almond extract

Icing:

• 3/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp. water

Equipment: Mixing bowl, floured surface, rolling pin or adequate subsitute (I’m looking at you, nalgene bottle), baking sheets, waxed paper, refrigerator, saintly patience, princely indecision.

Music: Morton Feldman - String Quartet No. 2

Instructions:

1. Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and let it sit for 5 minutes, then stir in soy milk, vanilla, cardamom, almond extract, salt, egg replacer, and sugar.
2. Chop the margarine into 1/4-inch chunks and combine with the flour in a mixing bowl, stirring gently until the lumps of margarine are coated in flour.
3. Add the liquid mixture to the flour and mix with a rubber spatula until the flour is moist enough to hold the dough together. Avoid over-mixing and blending the lumps of margarine into the dough.
4. Cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for 4+ hours.
5. Make the raspberry filling by combining all of the ingredients in a saucepan and cooking them on medium heat until thickened.
6. Make the soy cream cheese filling by beating all of the ingredients together until smooth.
7. Make the (royal!) icing by stirring the sugar and water together until smooth.
8. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and place on a floured surface. Roll it out into a large rectangle and fold the ends in lengthwise (as pictured) to form a three-layered piece of dough. Roll it out and fold it again. Perform this process four times, total, allowing the dough to “rest” in the refrigerator between iterations (this keeps the dough cold, which prevents the margarine from melting, which keeps the texture of the final pastry light and flaky. You can just do all of the rolling and folding at once if you don’t really care). Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate it for a couple hours (or freeze it until ready to use).
9. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and roll it out onto a floured surface so that it forms a large rectangle roughly 1/4 inch thick. Cut the dough into 5-inch squares (it should make 12-14 of them). Place about a tablespoon of filling in the center of each square and cut diagonal lines in from each corner to about 3/4 of an inch away from it (resulting in a sort of pastry iron cross). For each triangular flap of dough, take one of the corners and fold it across to its opposite and press the edges down to seal. Perform this process on each of the four sides to form a pinwheel shape.
10. Transfer the completed pastries to a greased (or wax-papered) baking sheet and sprinkle with sliced almonds if desired. Allow the dough 30 minutes at room temperature to rise. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
11. Bake the pastries for 20 minutes, remove them from the oven, and drizzle with icing while still warm.

Alternate methods:

• Instead of chopping up the margarine and mixing it with the flour you can mix the flour with the wet ingredients and roll the margarine out between two sheets of waxed paper, roll the dough and fold it over with the sheet of margarine sandwiched between the layers. The advantage to this method is that it will give the layers in your final product more definition and resmebles the creation of an exsquisite piece of Japanese steel. The disadvantage is that it takes more practice, patience, and waxed paper.
• Some people (like Dan, for instance) have qualms about eating anything as “processed” as soy cream cheese. A similarly flavored and textured filling can be created by combining 1 cup soymilk, 2 tbsp corn starch, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, and 1/4 tsp. almond extract in a saucepan and whisking them continuously over medium/high heat until thickened.
• You can make any fruit filling you like following similar guidelines to the raspberry recipe above, or you can simply use you favorite jelly, jam, or preserves. Also, don’t be afraid to throw a little chocolate on there.
• The above pastry recipe can be used to make a number of similar-tasting but differently-shaped treats, including filled crescents, pockets, and bear claws.

Some of you may have been thinking to yourself “Sure, Max’s cookblog is all well and good, but what if I want something more useful than a sporadically updated, incessantly sarcastic, barely indexed, poorly formatted, and hugely digressive series of vegan vignettes? If only there was some kind of concise, practical, and portable assemblage of recipes that I could refer to.” Well, my friends, look no further. Available online for the first time are download- and printable versions of I Was a Teenage Vegan Cookbook: Volume 1: Just Desserts and Volume 2: Everybody Dines Alone - everything you were looking for in one (two) convenient package(s) (except for the less sarcastic part, that is; I’m afraid I really can’t help you there. Also, hasn’t anyone ever told you not to end a sentence with a preposition before? Savages).

To download, simply click on the cookbooks’ respective covers and prepare to be dazzled by the spectacle of modern PDF technology. To print the pages in a way that makes some semblance of sense, print the cover and odd-numbered page sets first, set the cover aside, place the other pages back in your printer, and print the even-numbered pages on the opposite sides. To assemble, make sure the pages are in order, place the cover on top of them, and fold the entire pile in half down the center line. Finally, staple the pages together along the crease and you are ready to rock and roll.

For those of you who lack either a decent internet connection, printer, or stapler (or who just feel like my cookbooks are so awesome that they deserve to be bought and paid for), there are a few options available to you. For those of you who live in Boston, some copies can occasionally be found at the Lucy Parsons Center - a radical bookstore and community center in the South End. For those of you who live in New York, there may still be some copies left at Printed Matter - a slightly snooty art-focused bookstore with a huge zine selection (good luck finding mine there). For those of you who live on the internet, copies of volume 2 (and hopefully soon volume 1 (which has been out of print for some time) as well) are available through Learning to Leave a Paper Trail - an excellent online zine distro. Prices vary from place to place (from 1-5 dollars I believe) depending on any number of free market factors that are beyond my ability to explain or control. Lastly, for those of you who know my brother Luke I believe he is currently in possession of a large number of copies of both volumes that he plans to distribute for free, although you may have to help him staple them together first.

Coming up next time on I Was A Teenage Vegan CookBlog: recipes (for a change). I hope you’re all as excited for them as I am.

To my regular readers, I apologize for the brief lapse in my updates; I spent the past week or so lounging on the beaches of sunny Puerto Rico where the men are pink-cheeked, the women are robust, and the internet did not extend to my hotel room. Not that I would have had very much of vegan interest to write about, really, since I was forced to spend the entire week subsisting on some combination of rice, potatoes, plantains, and boiled bananas, which wouldn’t have been so awful if Puerto Ricans as an imagined culinary community weren’t so deathly afraid of spices that they were reluctant to even provide me with salt and pepper. Also, I hate the sun.

One good thing to come from this trip, however, was another batch of these delightful stickers:

The army has, of course, recently changed its slogan from the slightly misleading “an army of one” to the positively brutish “army strong”, but fortunately for us thus far news of the change seems to have been lost in translation. With a few quick modifications these previously egoistic declamations become a rallying cry that I think we can all get behind. These stickers look great on bicycles, microwaves, stop signs, and anywhere else that you can think to stick it to the man. All you have to do is go to your local recruiting office and feign interest and lack of English comprehension long enough for them to throw a few your way. Failing that, I’d be happy to send you one inside a copy of my latest zine in exchange for a dollar or two, a pleasing poem, or an oath of undying fealty. Either way supplies are limited, so don’t wait; pledge your allegiance today. Let all your friends know that resistance is futile. Join the Soy Army.