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Happy 2010 to all my readers! I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year. I look forward to keeping up with you throughout the year via this newsletter and my Facebook page. And I love to hear from readers with comments, questions, etc. You’ll find me at nava@vegkitchen.com.
I have a good supply of these titles, and I’m quite sure that they’d be happier on your night stand than in my office.
Humor duo: Purchase a copy of Secret Recipes for the Modern Wife, my darkly satirical look at contemporary marriage and motherhood in the guise of a faux-1950s cookbook, and get my earlier humor title, Expect the Unexpected When You’re Expecting (a parody of the famed pregnancy “bible”) free! Both books for $12, shipping included. If you know anyone who is getting married, getting divorced, or having a baby, these make great little gifts.
The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet: Have you or someone you know resolved to eat more plant-based meals, but aren’t sure how to begin? This is my most basic cookbook, perfect for those who are beginners in the kitchen, college students, teens going veg, or anyone who is really, really busy. $13 pretty much matches the Amazon.com price, and includes shipping.
For all the details, go to January Book Sale.
I was interviewed for an article in the January 2010 issue of Baltimore’s Child on “Helping Your Teen Go Veggie”.
The blog PinkVelvet Bird waxed ecstatic on my Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cake — it’s one of my family’s favorites and the recipe is the segment below.
San Diego State University announces their acquisition of my limited edition altered romance comic, Love and Marriage, “to support both the Women’s Studies and comic book collection” in their winter publication. Read about it here.
On True/Slant, Kim O’Donnel lists her favorite veg cookbooks for the cooks on your list, and includes Vegan Express as one of her choices in this column.
On my lit blog, Dear Literary Ladies, December’s writing advice is given by Emily Brontë, Madeleine L’Engle, and Louisa May Alcott. Read their timeless wisdom at Dear Literary Ladies.
Here is a random assortment of the kind of easy, comforting recipes I like to make at this time of year. The first three are adapted from Great American Vegetarian [http://vegkitchen.com/books/great-american-vegetarian.htm] and the last two from Vegan Express.
The Red Wine Cabbage recipe that follows is a good pairing with this; add some fresh rye bread or a simple cooked grain like quinoa, and a bountiful winter green salad for a robust meal.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Heat the oil in a deep saucepan. Add the onion and sauté over low heat until translucent. Add the garlic and continue to sauté until the onion is lightly browned. Add the remaining ingredients except the beans and simmer for 10 minutes.
Combine the sauce with the beans in a 1 1/2-quart baking casserole and mix well. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then stir, and bake uncovered for an additional 15 minutes. Serve at once or set aside for several hours, then heat as needed before serving.
Bite-sized chunks of meatless sausage lend an authentic flair to this vegan version of a Creole-Cajun classic. Serve with coleslaw, sautéed greens (kale or collards), and fresh corn bread for a hearty, satisfying winter dinner
Combine the water and rice in a saucepan; bring to a rapid simmer, then lower the heat, cover, and simmer gently until the water is absorbed, about 30 to 35 minutes.
Heat the oil in the large skillet. Add the onion and sauté over medium heat until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic, celery, and bell pepper, and sliced sausage links, and continue to sauté until all the vegetables and sausage are lightly browned.
Add the remaining ingredients except the salt. Heat until the tomato liquid simmers, then cover and cook over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes.
Combine the skillet mixture with the hot cooked rice in a large serving bowl and toss together thoroughly. Season to taste with salt (and a bit more cayenne if you’d like) and serve at once.
This invitingly aromatic side dish is adapted from a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe. It’s a great way to highlight an underused winter vegetable.
Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onion and sauté over medium heat until it is translucent. Add the cabbage and all the remaining ingredients except the flour. Stir together and cook over low heat, covered, for 20 to 25 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until the cabbage is tender but still has a bit of crunch.
Sprinkle in the flour and stir it in completely. Simmer for another few minutes, uncovered, until the liquid has thickened a bit. Serve at once.
The broccoli in the market has been surprisingly good lately—much better than it was in the fall. No matter what time of year, it seems like we can’t get enough of this favorite green veggie. Red pepper flakes—to your personal taste—gives the dish a spark of heat in this speedy preparation.
Cut the broccoli crowns into bite-sized florets.
Gently heat the soy sauce, oil, and wine in a medium skillet. Stir in the sugar. Add the broccoli and stir quickly to coat. Turn the heat up to medium high and cover.
Cook until the broccoli is bright green and just tender-crisp. Uncover and stir-fry until any liquid remaining in the skillet is reduced. Stir in the sesame seeds, season with red pepper flakes, and serve.
This has long been a family favorite as an everyday kind of cake. I often make it when I’m asked to bring dessert to a gathering, and when I do, I double the recipe so I can leave one of the cakes at home!
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a mixing bowl and stir together.
Combine the applesauce, rice milk, and peanut butter in another bowl and whisk together until smooth. Pour into the flour mixture and stir together until fairly well blended, then use a whisk until the mixture is smooth.
Stir in the chocolate chips and optional peanuts. Pour into a lightly oiled 9-inch round or square cake pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until golden on top and a knife inserted into the center comes out with chocolate, but no batter.
Allow to cool to room temperature or just warm, then cut into squares or wedges to serve.
When the publisher of Anna Thomas’s new book, Love Soup: 160 All-New Vegetarian Recipes from the Author of The Vegetarian Epicure, contacted me to see if I would be interested in reviewing the book and perhaps do a Q & A with the author, I jumped at the chance. Her first book, The Vegetarian Epicure (1972) was truly the pioneering effort in contemporary vegetarian cuisine, predating Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook by five years. Anna wrote it when she was a graduate student in film at UCLA and it became an instant classic; later she achieved success in the film world as well. Read about her fascinating parallel paths in her bio.
As someone who has straddled the worlds of food and art for many years, I was eager to ask Anna a few questions on what it has been like for her, and how her food and film careers intersect. But first, a few words about Love Soup. It’s a testament to how much I have been enjoying Love Soup that I’m willing to plug the one book that’s the most direct competitor to my own Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews for All Seasons! But in a full life, one can’t have too much soup, nor too much love. If you like stories with your soup, you’ll love this book. It’s easy to see why Anna is in film, with her penchant for narratives that weave their way throughout the book. She offers up origins of recipes, lyrical descriptions of seasonal produce, and musings on how friends, family, and food intertwine. Thus, a book of 160 recipes fills more than 500 pages, and in this case, it’s a good thing, and will delight anyone who loves to read cookbooks as if they are novels.
The recipes are arranged seasonally and include chapters such as “Big Soups and Stews,” “First Tastes of Spring,” “Green and Greener,” among others. They are labeled with a bold V if they’re vegan, which is true for the majority of soups. There are a plethora of menu suggestions and chapters devoted to accompaniments such as breads, sandwich spreads and dips, salads, and even a few choice sweets with which to end a soup meal. Soups I’ve sampled thus far are the Green Soup (green soups are a highlight of this book), Red Lentil and Squash Soup, and Roasted Root Vegetable Soup (recipe follows). I’m looking forward to trying the Olive and Rosemary Focaccia and the Roasted Eggplant and Garbanzo Bean Soup, served together, in the very near future. If there is a style that characterizes these soups, it would be earthy and rustic. The soups are well seasoned and the methods allow for personalization of spicing, as well as variation. Anyone who possesses this book will gain instant entry to Soup Heaven. This is already getting too long, so allow me to segue into my Q & A with Anna Thomas.
For more information or to purchase this book, go to the Amazon.com page for Love Soup.
Nava: Anna, I’m very interested in your work, because like me, you’ve had parallel careers in the arts and in publishing, with an emphasis on veg cookbooks. Thank you for your role in bringing great vegetarian food into the mainstream. Have your career paths fed one another (sorry for the bad pun!), or have they been separate?
Anna: When I was promoting The New Vegetarian Epicure, which is based around menus, a journalist told me that the menus felt like little stories to her, and asked me if I could compare creating these menus with my fiction writing. I said, menus are easy, fiction is hard.
For me, cooking is a joy and a respite from the more stressful and demanding work of screenwriting or film production. I love writing stories, and making films, but it is hard work in a tough business. When I go into the kitchen and cook something, when I sit down to eat with my family or share food with my friends, I feel a sense of well-being, I relax and remember that I am human. Perhaps that is why I so enjoy writing about food, because it allows me to hold onto that.
In one sense, everything I do is part of the same thing — it’s communication. I am always trying to reach people, whether with a film or a book about food. We writers are peculiar, aren’t we? We feel the need to tell our dreams to strangers in faraway places, to strangers in the dark. We want to become part of them. I do it with drama, and also in my cookbooks, where I speak very directly to other cooks; I feel they are in the kitchen with me. I love it when I get letters from people who say, I feel like I know you…
But the only real “career” connection between my food writing and my film work happened early on when I wrote The Vegetarian Epicure while I was a film student at UCLA. The book became a success, and helped me get through graduate school and make my master’s thesis film. Then, the royalties from both that and The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two funded the lengthy development of El Norte, a project that took a long time to write and even longer to finance, but that ultimately launched my film career and Greg Nava’s. [note: Greg Nava is Anna’s husband]
Nava: Another thing we both share is a penchant for soup. What is it about soup that inspired you to return to the genre of cookbook writing?
Anne: I love soup! And I want to bring everyone in the world along into that happy state, one pot at a time. At a book signing, a man raised his hand and asked about that title — adjective or verb? I said, it’s a command!
In the introduction to Love Soup I relate the stages of my relationship with soup, from early eating experiences, through the raising of my children, and on to the moment when I left my gigantic empty nest. I moved into a temporary space in a converted painter’s studio while my new house was being radically remodeled, put in a tiny kitchen and fitted it out with a few basic pots and pan while everything else went into storage. I thought I would be using it for about 6 months. I was an idiot. Three years later, I was still cooking in the 81-inch kitchen, and day after day, week after week, soup was saving me! I found I could still shop at the farmers market, enjoy cooking at home, eat fresh, delicious food, and have my friends over for relaxed, friendly meals — if I made soup the center of those meals. So practical, so variable and so delicious. After a while I thought, I must write about this — and so Love Soup came about.
Nava: I see you take a special interest in green soups, and that’s one of the recipes I’ve tried thus far. We still had kale and Swiss chard in our Hudson Valley garden in late November and so it was a particular pleasure to use them in your recipe. Aside from your evident love and flair for this kind of soup, do you have any other favorite style of soup that would be particularly enticing for the month of January?
Anna: Green Soup — the best! It’s something of a cult now; I get more mail about green soup, in its many variations, than about any other single subject. It is a great soup any time, but really the perfect antidote for rich holiday eating. I have a big, traditional celebration on Christmas Eve, and this year on Christmas morning I got up and made a green soup. It was gone in less than a day. I just finished making another pot — Green Soup with Sweet Potatoes and Sage — and am enjoying a bowl of green for lunch as I type this.
In month of January, when it’s cold and dark — that’s when we really need something warming and rib-sticking, isn’t it? I have a chapter called The Comfort of Soup in Deep Winter, in which I collected the soups I like to eat in the coldest months. I love the Mushroom-Barley Soup with Cabbage, such an old-fashioned Polish flavor from my immigrant childhood, and also the Roasted Root Vegetable Soup. And when you roast root vegetables, do a double batch — they are a wonderful addition to salads or to a risotto. That chapter also has Sopa de Ajo, the Spanish garlic soup that you make in a single, hearty serving. It takes less than ten minutes.
I also love to cook a big minestrone, or my Cranberry Bean and Ten Vegetable Soup. All the hearty bean soups, and the winter squash soups as well, are mainstays. How can you go wrong with a Spicy Black Bean Soup, or with Old-Fashioned Split Pea Soup? That split pea soup is so easy that even a total beginner can do it. In about fifteen minutes you can cut up the celery and carrots and onions, put everything in the pot, then go away and catch up with your email. An hour later, come back and have hot soup.
OK, let’s face it. Soup is always your friend, but in January it’s your best friend.
To make roasted root vegetables:
For the soup:
First, roast your vegetables. (Anna notes that the recipe yields about double the amount of roasted vegetables you’ll actually need for the soup, which you can use in any way you’d like. But if you want to make only what’s needed for the soup, cut the recommended amounts in half.)
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Peel and dice all the vegetables to a fairly uniform size, about 1 inch. The onions can be cut in slightly larger pieces, as they are less dense. You should have about 3 cups each of the diced rutabagas, turnips, yams, and fennel, 1 2/3 cup of diced carrots, and 6 cups of cut onions. Mix the vegetables together in a large bowl with the olive oil, salt, pepper to taste, thyme, sage, and sherry. Vary the amount of herbs to your taste; the amounts given here will add a subtle flavor to the vegetables but won’t dominate.
Spread the vegetables over two shallow baking pans and roast them for an hour or a little longer, until they are tender and flecked with dark brown spots. Mix and turn the vegetables a few times during the roasting, and about midway through reverse the position of the pans between upper and lower racks in the oven. The vegetables will reduce in volume as they roast, and you should have about 8 cups when they are done.
To make the soup:
Combine the barley in a large soup pot with 1 1/2 cups water, a dash of salt, and 5 cups vegetable broth. Bring the liquid to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer the barley, covered, for 35 minutes. The barley will swell to two or three times its original size and maintain its distinctive chewy texture.
Add 4 cups of the roasted vegetables (you can coarsely chop them first if the pieces look too large to you) and simmer the soup for about 15 minutes to marry the flavors. Taste,and add more salt if it is needed. Add the parsley and sherry vinegar during the last few minutes. If the soup seems too thick, add another cup or so of vegetable broth.
I like to finish the soup with my favorite garnish, a swirl of fruity olive oil.
A couple of months ago, Wild Veggie US sent me samples of their products, which are concentrated purees of broccoli, carrot, or red bell pepper. These can be used as bases for hot or cold soups, stirred into casseroles or sauces to add flavor or nutrition, or just heated (or chilled) and served as hot or cold soups. I had the carrot and broccoli varieties just by themselves, heated up in a mug. They’re only 70 and 80 calories per 8-ounce serving, so they make a perfect snack. They were delicious. I stirred the red bell pepper variety into a lentil soup, to which it added body and flavor. These “Souper Drinks” are good sources of vitamin A and/or C as well as dietary fiber.
Wild Veggie is just making its way onto the market and is in limited distribution at Whole Foods stores and other locations in California, Florida, and Michigan. For locations, click here. Let’s hope customer demand makes this product more widely available.
Finally, the message about the devastating effects of animal agriculture is starting to make some headway. It’s still too much of an “inconvenient truth” for Al Gore, but for many of us, giving up meat is not only a compassionate gesture but one of the single most significant ways to reduce greenhouse gases that are responsible for climate change. I love this video, with its powerful message conveyed in a gentle manner. Watch A Life Connected, and share with others!
Useful articles for this cold and blustery month:
Stay warm and healthy until we meet again in February,
Nava
Nava Atlas
In a Vegetarian Kitchen
