A disaster from the start...

Last week I went to the farmer's market and picked up a lot of veggies, fully intending to cook all week. Sadly, the week got away from me and I just tried to use the ingredients before they went bad. I had a mix of random things. Two kinds of potatoes, an onion, baby eggplant, and beets. I looked online for some ideas but nothing struck me. So I thought I would just roast it all (mistake #1). So I cut up all the ingredients which took forever and started sauteing some onions and garlic.
Cutting the beets was gross. But the beetblood on my hand (I am so Lady Macbeth) reminded me to cook the beets separate or they would run all over everything.

So I put the potatoes in the pan and mixed it with the onion and garlic and added some thyme. Then I put that mixture in a pan and stuck it in the oven. I put the eggplant peeled and cut on top of the potatoes.


I put the beets in the saute pan to heat them up (mistake #3). The beets were not cooking well so I put them on a cookie sheet (only other pan I had to bake something in) and waited until the potatoes were done to put the beets in the oven.


At the end I threw the beets over the potatoes and put it back in the oven.

It came out ok, but not great. The potatoes were kind of oily and they still stuck to the bottom, the beets were kind of chewy. I had to pick off the eggplant and throw it out because it tasted gross. All in all, not the most successful dish. The best thing was the onion. It was just a really good onion.

I made this hummus to make up for it which came out really well. Thanks to my friend Jennifer for that recipe.

Arts and Crafts

I know this is not food, but the colors are the same as my plate, so I thought it was worth sharing here.


This is a present I wrapped for a wedding my sister is going to. We had tissue paper of two colors to work with. I think I did a pretty nice job. I am especially proud of the tissue paper flower. I thought it was a nice touch.

Catching up on my posting...Guacamole!

I was stuck on what to eat for lunch yesterday, so I looked in my fridge (it was all very much like the show Chopped on the Food Network--What do I have to work with?). I had some avocado, cilantro, and tomato. I was going to use the cilantro to add to that chipotle pepper sauce I made but never did. So with those ingredients I of course made Guacamole. I used avocado, tomato, chili powder, garlic, powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, fresh cilantro, and lime. I could have used fresher ingredients but I was working with what I had in my pantry just like on Chopped.

I have had better Guacamole, for sure. But this did the job and it was a very satsfying, if not thrown together, way to fill my one plate for lunch yesterday.

Here is the Guacamole and the plate waiting for it.


And here is my lunch.

I'm no Rick Bayless, Top Chef Master, but I thought it came out pretty tasty.

The Trials and Tribulations of Breading

I have been remiss in posting and I have to admit that by this time when I am posting about my experience making breaded eggplant, all the eggplant has been eaten... days ago. Bad blogger :( Breading eggplant has been something I have tried many times and always failed. Without egg I find it very difficult to get the breadcrumbs to stick. The one thing I have to say that I did very well this time was prep the eggplant. I was very patient. I salted one side, let it sit, rinsed it, salted the other side, let it sit, rinsed it. So the eggplant came out nice and tender and not tough like usual. I began using ricemilk to wet it and then dipped it in the breadcrumbs. Then I fried it in oil.



Not only did I use WAY too much oil, but the breadcrumbs fell right off. Since I have a history of getting really frustrated with breading, I caved and added one egg to my rice milk. I was not happy about cracking an egg and seeing the yolk (ew) but I just really wanted the breading to stick. I figured mixed with the rice milk it was a very, very small amount of egg. Bad vegan :( But that worked better.


The next thing I did that really helped was double dip. I dipped in the ricemilk mixture, then the breadcrumbs, then back in the ricemilk, then back in the crumbs. It got the breading much thicker. I wonder if I had done that before trying the egg I could have done it truly vegan.


Then they were really oily from the pan frying so I baked them. Next time I am going to use a very, very light spray and not worry so much about getting the eggplant soft, then I will bake longer to get the eggplant soft.

Here is the final product!!


You live, you learn!

Anyone hungry?

Tonight I made a Black Eyed Pea Cake with Chipotle Aioli inspired by an appetizer I had at Blossom in Chelsea (http://www.blossomnyc.com/). Actually, I made enough for 1o people so if anyone is hungry...

Here is the final product.When I first put it on the plate it looked a little like a boob. So I added the avocado which helped.

I started by sauteing some onion, garlic, salt, pepper, thyme, and chili powder.
Then I pureed the black eyed peas and added the onion and garlic mixture.

Then I cooked them like pancakes.

For the Chiptole Aioli I put peppers with their sauce, some tofu, lime, rice milk and salt in a blender.
You can see I put in WAY too much pepper. So I cooled it down with avocado which was good but made the color more dull. And my mom gave me the tip of adding honey which helped too.

This took a long time to make because I had to cook all the cakes. I also had to play with the sauce a lot. But it tasted pretty good. And now I have PLENTY!

Empty

Tonight my plate looks like this because I did not have dinner. I snacked a little at the place where I was, but no real dinner. :(

Dig in!

Dig it, or dig in, I have started a food blog. I join the millions of others, and millions more after the release of Julie and Julia, who write about their food. But I have wanted to do this for a while. And the movie Julie and Julia is so wonderful and so inspiring that here I am putting hand to keyboard and food to camera. I read lots of food blogs. So I can tell you what this blog will be and what it won't be. It won't be a bunch of recipes. Not only are recipes not my style, but I don't have the patience. I am more like food network, saying what the dish is and never really giving you enough detail to make it at home. It will be my musings on food, what I cook and why with the occasional note about how I did it.

A note about my diet: I am vegan. Except, I eat cake, cookies and anything else where egg and dairy is cooked in. Basically baked goods only. But I usually bake vegan. It is like Julie Powell in the movie said "I have never eaten an egg...except in cake." The quote may not be accurate but the idea is there. I have eaten eggs in the past though. And I am not one of those animal rights activist vegans. I just think animals are kind of gross and don't want to eat them.Oh, another word about my cooking. I have a tiny kitchen with about 4 inches of counter space. And I own one large plate. It is white with blue and green stripes. You will see it.

So tonight I got a glimpse of a Throwdown with Bobby Flay where he threw down with one of my favorite cookie places: Le Vain Bakery on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Delicious. So tonight I made vegan cookies. I made them using EnerG Egg Replacer. I usually don't like to use this because it doesn't feel like an ingredient, it feels like a chemical. But tonight I was too tired to figure something else out. Here they are:

And there is my plate. I made these cookies late at night after work and it is summer so with the stove on it was crazy hot and I am really tired. So here is one more photo and that will close my first entry. Oh and yes, I have no mixing bowl so I usually do those types of things in a pot.

Buon Appetite!