Thanksgiving Part 2: The Dinner

When we arrived at my aunt's house we delivered our food. Another relative had brought some deli salads and sliced turkey. I was glad we had cooked. Here is my Thanksgiving plate (definitely missed my big blue and green plate):


Other than what we brought, I ate a potato knish, some kasha varnishkes (bowties with buckwheat), and a stuffed grape leaf. Not very traditional to the holiday but it was OK.

Here was our table. We wanted to keep it simple and clean so my aunt did not have to clean up.



I thought my mom's veggies looked really good. They tasted good too.


EW, gross. But people did like the chicken.


Then there was dessert from our family bakery. Follow us on Twitter: @MindysDesserts or become a fan on facebook.





This is a Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie which I could not eat due to the cheese.


Apple Cranberry Pie.


Birthday cake for my Bubby since it was her Birthday.


Blueberry pie, which I did eat and enjoy.


It was a fun and very tasty night. It was nice to have all the cousins in one place. I don't think we have been all together for about 3 years. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture of all of us. But here are a few fun family pictures.

My sister.

3 generations! Me, my Bubby, and my mom.


Two generations! My Zayda and my cousin.


A word about my Bubby and Zayda: They are the best! My Zayda just turned 89 and he is a reader of this blog, we instant message and email all the time, and he is soon going to join facebook. My Bubby just turned 82. She tells the best family stories from her childhood and her teaching days.

And, to end the post, a picture of my aunt bringing the cake to my Bubby for her birthday.


All in all, a good holiday!

Thanksgiving: Part 1

What is a food blog without a Thanksgiving entry? However, being vegan (kind of), this will not include a detailed account of our Turkey. In fact, this Thanksgiving my family did things a little differently and we did not even have a Turkey (yay!). But we did have chicken (ew!). My cousin was recently in a car accident. He is OK but cannot leave the house for a while. So we went over to my aunt's house to see him. Given all that she is doing to take case of my cousin, she didn't want to make a big dinner. She makes the best turkey (apparently, I don't eat it so I don't know), so no one wanted to make turkey if it was not going to be hers. So my mom and I cooked a couple of dishes and brought them over. Part one of the Thanksgiving post will detail our cooking adventures on Thanksgiving day while watching the parade.

Early in the morning, my mom got up and made two roast chickens to bring. Being that the chickens really gross me out, I did not chronicle their creation. I will say, my mom makes very good chicken and everyone always loves it. But it is not featured here because I think meat is gross.

I did watch the parade on TV. My favorite part was on CBS when Mayor Bloomberg went on about how NYC was great and how other cities are mosaics while we are a more of a mixture. And he didn't stop there, he then went on about how we tolerate people who are different and they tolerate us. Talk about putting your foot in your mouth. But after the parade it was hard core cooking time. So while my sister watched Dexter on TV, my mom and I cooked.


So I started to make the stuffing that we brought. I began cutting up carrots, celery, zucchini, onion, and mushrooms. Cutting the onions was brutal:
All the vegetables chopped up looked like, a mosaic.
But then, all together, it was more of a mixture...just like NYC.


Then it was time to add the bread. I had to take off all the crusts. In retrospect, a nice whole wheat bread, unsliced, probably would have been delicious. But I used a mix of sourdough and challah instead. I had to card the crust off the challah. I felt like the bakers on the Challenge on the food network when they carve the cake.


And here is the bottom of the challah. A little goupy from being in the sink, but I thought it looked kind of crazy. So I wanted to show you, too.


And, since we made A LOT of stuffing, I was back to using a pot as a big bowl, just like in New York. Sometimes a big soup pot is just the best mixing bowl.


So then, after mixing, I laid it out in the pan and poured the wine, vegetable stock and spices over it all.


I put it in the oven to bake but it became a little too soggy on the bottom and too crispy on the top. So we mixed it together and heated it in a big pot.


Then we put it back in the oven. It looked pretty good when it came out. I guess stuffing is supposed to be made in a turkey, but I thought it came out OK.



Next time I will sautee all the veggies and spices first then mix it with the bread. The veggies were a little crunchy, but it tasted OK.


Meanwhile...I was also making sweet potato mash. I boiled the sweet potatoes.


Then mashed away!


And added some cinnamon.


Mixed some more.


They came out very good.


Finally, all this time, my mom was working on a massive cold vegetable dish. She steamed broccoli, asparagus, and green beans. She had to cool them down really quickly in ice water.


Then she made a sauce with mushrooms, soy, ginger, garlic, etc. and poured it over top of the vegetables.


The it was topped with some toasted sesame seeds.


It looked very good. Then we packed our bags to head over to my aunts house.


We also brought dessert from our family bakery.


Stay tuned for Part 2: The Dinner...

A little rant against bridal showers (apologies to those who like them).

So I recently bought some kitchen equipment to supplement my very limited supply.
I hardly had room for the two things I bought in my small kitchen.


At the same time that I spent money on a few kitchen wares (baking pans and a little chopper thing), my mom was invited to a flurry of weddings, and thus a flurry of bridal showers. Now, I always say to each his/her own (well, I sometimes say that), but I just don't understand bridal showers. Why does society think you only need a kitchen when you are married??

Just because you are getting married, doesn't mean you all of a sudden start cooking and need a state of the art kitchen. SINGLE PEOPLE COOK TOO! I also think it is weird to ask people to stock your kitchen in addition to giving you a wedding gift.

Here is an interesting alternative I found to the bridal shower that I think people should consider. Or, maybe I should marry myself like Carrie Bradshaw on the Sex and the City episode "A Woman's Right to Shoes" where she says, "I'm getting married...to myself. And oh, by the way, I'm registered at Manolo Blahnik." I wouldn't register there, but you get the idea.

The Charity Shower

So, to wrap up, you don't have to married to need a kitchen, and if a bride-to-be has been living without a fancy cutting board up until now, she can probably wait until her actual wedding to have one.

Adventures of the soft pretzel...

Yes, it has been a long time. So long that I can't even remember when I attempted to make soft pretzels. A week ago? Maybe two. I know that it was in the midst of the Phillies excitement because I decided to make pretzels, a truly Philly food, to celebrate the successes of the Phillies. Well, the world series is over and the Phillies are defeated, but I am proud of them. So now, I will post my pretzel adventure.

Let me start my saying the the Philly pretzel is an art form I knew I would not master. It is a thing of beauty and culinary genius. These are not mine. These are the real deal.



But I wanted to try it out. There were missteps, for sure. But it was not a total disaster. I started by putting the yeast in hot water. It was supposed to foam but this is all I got.


So perhaps this had an effect on the final product. I also ran out of regular flour and substituted with whole wheat flour. I think these two things together contributed to a pretzel that was too dense.

I mixed the dough which was kind of fun but also annoyingly messy.



Then I let it rise. I think the yeast was not active enough because it did not rise that much. I also did not have a big bowl so I had to let it rise in a pot while I used the big pot to boil the solution for the next step. So there was not that much room to let it rise.



I then rolled the pretzels and let them rise, which is what the recipe said.
But when I went to transfer the pretzels to the boiling water, they stuck together and the shape was compromised so I needed to re-roll them. This must also have made them too dense.


I boiled the pretzels in baking soda and sugar. This is supposed to make them golden brown and crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

I then had to make the salt stick. I ended up using the dreaded egg.


I hate using eggs. When they are cracked they remind me of a monster.

Please, if anyone knows a substitute sticky substance that actually works, let me know. But for this project, I used this grossness:

After baking, the pretzels did come out nice and golden-brown.

The taste was not horrible but they were just so heavy. Way too dense.


Hopefully I will do better next time. I feel it is my duty as someone from Philly to make a good soft pretzel.

Great Find! A Gem!

I recently found that the TV show "Kitchen Confidential" is on hulu.
http://www.hulu.com/kitchen-confidential
I am so excited. I watched this show with my mom when it was on in 2005. Then it was prematurely canceled.

I loved this show. It stars Bradley Cooper, in his earlier days. It also stars Nicholas Brendan (for the Buffy fans out there), Frank Langella (that's right, on a sitcom with Bradley Cooper), and the guy who plays Sam in "Freaks and Geeks" (another must see) all grown up. While it may not give you any cooking tips, it will feed your cooking bug for a little and is an awesome show. Highly recommended!

Food Matters

This is a wonderful article in the food issue of the New York Times Magazine called "Against Meat." Read it!

While my reasons for being a mostly vegan are very different from Jonathan Safran Foer's reasons for being a sometimes vegetarian, the way he talks about a person's journey to decide what to eat is very well told and thought provoking.

He write, "Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter."

I won't give away the end of the article, but it builds to this touching last line, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

It really made me think about being vegan and why I am vegan. And the link to Jewish culture and Jewish tenets made the article even more thought provoking for me.

"Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division with what came before — the most well-known example being the smashing of the glass at the end of the wedding ceremony. Things were as they were, but they will be different now. Things will be better. We will be better."

I don't remember the exact days I started stripping meat and cheese and eggs from my diet, but I have kept this diet as most Jews keep kosher. It is just something I do. Sure, my weak digestive system has a lot to do with my diet, but Foer points out that food gives an identity. Like how I have to have a Matzah Ball on Rosh Hashana and Passover even if I have it in myown special pot with vegetable broth, because that is what we eat on those holidays.

Foer writes, "In high school I became vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly."

This article is about the importance of your dietary choices and the greater importance of the stories that come with your food. Well, I hope you have been enjoying the stories of my food and I will continue to try and share my food with you. Because food matters.

Read the article.

Green Soup and Glee!

Last night I made some Green Soup! Yup, it is very green. I got the recipe at 101 Cookbooks.com here. I usually don't follow recipes, but this time I was pretty exact. I started with sweet potato. I boiled it.


Then I chopped up the onion and caramelized them in a pan.


Chopped up some leeks. I always love leeks in soups. I am not even sure what the pure flavor of a leek is, but if you are making a soup, I say, "Throw it in there!"


Then I added some green chard and spinach.


And then I added some vegetable stock to ... well, I wanted to say "beef it up," but that would be weird on a vegan food blog. I added vegetable stock to give it body.


The recipe said you can leave it chunky or puree it. It looks a lot prettier when left chunky, but in terms of taste it was better pureed. Getting a chunk of chard was a little bitter. Much better when all the flavors hit your mouth at once. So, into the blender it went.


And it came out green! It tasted pretty good. The ginger made it a little stringy, but I liked having the ginger taste. Oh, and ya know how I had one plate to my name (which is no longer the case)? Well, I only have one bowl, too. My sister has some dishes, but for the most part we only eat out of our own. So here is the soup.


And I have plenty.


I watched the TV show Glee while I ate it. I like the show. I am often disappointed in the musical numbers because I think they could be a lot better. I don't like how it looks so much like they are lip syncing. I wish it looked more like they were singing in the moment.

Jane Lynch is AMAZING on the show. She is the reason I am into the show. She is hilarious. Favorite quote from the episode Vitamin D:

"Oh dear god, stop talking. I'm trying to desperately to ignore the treacly, sweet inanity of your asinine conversation, but now I've got bile in my mouth and I will hold my tongue no further."

Love Jane Lynch!

On another note, here are some good foods I have eaten of late that I did not cook but hope to cook soon!

This carrot cookie was so good. I got it at the Union Square farmer's market. It was perfect for breaking the fast at Yom Kippur.


And, the best for last! THE GIANT PRETZEL!!!! This was great. I got it at Amy's Bread! I hope to make soft pretzels soon. being from Philly, I am kind of obsessed with them. Don't worry, I did not eat this alone. My sister helped (a little). :) It was real good. Not from Philly, that was clear. But it was good.


Till next time...