Deb's Night: Mushrooms and Pretzels, vegan style

Our official menu tonight:
Soft Pretzels (The Joy of Vegan Baking)
Mushroom Soup (Veganomicon)
Radish, Corn, Avocado Salad (The Conscious Cook)
Jelly Cupcakes (Veganomicon)

"Money is Never an Object For Cooking Club"

Walking into cooking club today, I was greeted by a tremendously organized kitchen, a la Stations of the Place, but today it's even better, because the blogging station has also been set up.  Epic.  Anyway, Deb takes a very healthy approach to cooking club, where she, you know, plans ahead of time, and apparently spends as much  money as is necessary to follow the recipe.  You know what that means?  Chantarelles.  (!)  Who are we that get to eat fancy pants mushrooms?  I like it.  Even in spite of being mostly sick.  Sniffins (Sarah) is here, which is fitting, because she totally got me sick.  She's on cupcake duty, and her mise en place is epic.  Epic!

Soft Pretzels

Bri is on the pretzel station, and Deb got his mise en place set up in a pretty thorough way beforehand.  Just like Grandma did, apparently.  So the yeasted dough was made ahead of time, and then all Brian had to do was form the dough into lumps to rise more, and finally get turned into pretzels.

As it turns out, 'turning into pretzels' requires more panache and skill than was expected, so the job was turned over to Jim.  Jim, working with pottery, has lots of practice in this sort of thing, so we passed the job on to him.  Sniffins, who hates being told that she can't do something, then decided that she could do it too.  And finally, Deb gets a go, too, so we can compare everyone.  Some pretzel recipes call for boiling the dough in baking soda water, but this one just calls for dipping in the baking soda solution.  It's ambiguous whether you dip before or dip after, and also ambiguous whether it calls for an egg wash.  Sniffins decides that egg wash is the way to go, so it happens!

Here are some helpful examples of how to/not to make pretzels.  I let you decide on your own preference.

Jim

Deb

Brian

Sara

Pro-tips for pretzel making:

• the longer roll you make, the easier it is to pretzel them.
• sea monster pretzels look pretty awesome
• recipes are for chumps

Salad

Today's salad is going to be pretty special - it appears to involve fresh corn, avocado, arugula and agave radishes.  Agave radishes?  Yes.  Jim is patiently slicing radishes, which will then be blanched, and soaked in agave with ice water. Green beans also got blanched and chopped, and the collection of vegetables looks pretty wonderful.  The dressing is supposed to be a vinaigrette, but we were discussing previous dressing successes to perhaps do instead.  My personal favorite is to blend things into a dressing - herbs are great, of course, but lately I've been smitten with blending a whole orange into a vinaigrette.  So good!  We'll see if I can convince these crazy people that are so into following the recipe...

Actually,  our dressing was made by straining the corn out of some delicious corn salsa from Trader Joe's.  Take that, boring vinaigrette.

Deb: "What are these herbs for...oh yeah!  The salad!"

Fresh basil - oh, man, what an intoxicating scent.



Mushroom Soup

So Deb has a collection of fresh mushrooms from the Farmer's Market, as well as dried Chantarelles from the Whole Paycheck.   Garlic, Onions, Wild Rice and homemade stock went in, too, and now we're letting it cook.  And cook, and cook, and cook.  Wild Rice, as it turns out, takes a long time to cook.  And cook and cook.  Fortunately I can use this time to write the blog, and listen to the gang talk about Ira Glass, lucid dreams and NPR.

Jim: "the rice is done."
Deb: "but it's all wet!"
Jim: "...it's a soup..."


Cupcakes

Sniffins is on cupcakes, which I think are supposed to be weird vegan cupcake versions of jelly donuts.  It's from the Veganomicon, though, which is really a pretty delightful cookbook.  So we're not at all skeptical, no.  Anyway, Sniffins mixed the ingredients, and after a snafu involving a cup of corn starch, which was fortunately early enough that we didn't stay committed to a cup of corn starch.

An aside, there is apparently a town in China called "Usa", so that people can say things like "made in USA" and not technically be lying.  Yup.  The shirts at the Hempest that say "Made in Boston" on the front are in fact made in China.  Bleh.

Anyway, the batter ended up a little lumpy, but not so bad.  I can tell you, since I...uh...ate the batter out of the bowl.  Yup.  So we discovered that the best way to pour into the cupcake cups was using the bowl with a pouring spout.  These jelly donut cupcakes involve putting jam on top of the cupcake batter, with the notion that the jam will seep in to the cupcake as it cooks.  We ended up with raspberry jam, which is going to perhaps be too fancy for a jelly donut, but we're fancy people, so we'll just make it work.  The most mysterious part of the recipe is that we're supposed to let the cupcakes get stale (?!) before eating them.  Follow-The-Recipe-Deb is following the recipe.  Stale cupcakes it is.

Pro-tip:  The jam just stayed on top.  It would probably be easier to fill the cups up halfway, add the jam, and then put a little more on top.


Final Results

Golden cooked pretzels with sea salt.

Salad, in all its glory!

Cupcakes with powdered sugar.

Mushrooms soup with wild rice.

Reviews

	Alex	Brian	Deb	Jim	Sniffins
Salad	B+  The fresh oregano was overpowering, but I love the avocado!	B.  But only because I don't really care for arugula.  But!  Tasty!	A-. I would definitely make it again but I need a creamy dressing.	A-.  I think it needed more dressing.  Even the radishes were edible (read: high praise)	A-.  Fresh oregano: wacky.
Pretzels	B  Fresh bread is good, but, you know, it wasn't a pretzel.	As pretzels go they made really great dinner rolls...B+  (hey!  salt!)	C- but what Brian said.  I'm just harsher.	B.  They were delicious rolls.  They needed to be boiled.	B-.  They were delicious dinner rolls, but not pretzely.
Soup	C-  All I tasted was the rice.  It needed more salt, more fat, and more flavor.  Maybe some soy sauce?	A.  I would make it again, and I would encourage other people to make it again!	C-.  It was bland somehow, and I really just tasted wild rice.  PS, I put no salt in.	A-.  I think it would have benefitted from larger chunks of mushroom.  Just something...some little extra flavoring.	A-.  More broth!  I thought it was so good!
Cupcakes	B  They weren't so bad!  I liked them.	B-.  I liked it better than I expected.	I definitely wouldn't make them again.  That's like a B-...they tasted like breakfast.	B+.  I think they're fairly decent, but they could be improved.	C+. Undercooked -- I think they needed frosting.  Also, they jelly should have been buried!  It would have been easy!

Farscape:

Sniffins:  That shit's so terrible.
Deb:  We're taking two weeks off.
Bri:  Meh.
Jim:  I wanna...shoot the TV or myself.
Alex:  I was happy to be blogging the whole time.