Saludos, fine readers! This is Brian chronicling Deb’s night, and we have churning winds outside courtesy of Hurricane Leslie, and a vegan southern night going on in here. We’re talking turnip stew, collard greens, bbq tofu (with homemade bbq sauce), fresh corn, and for dessert apple enchiladas.
For a better understanding of what Deb’s had to do to get to this point, let’s recap her last 30 hours: job interview, getting caught out in a thunderstormy downpour, several hours of sleep broken by insomnia, early morning bike ride to Comcast to get a working modem, later morning walk to MicroCenter to replace the router, an hour crawling around under the desk trying to heal our massively dysfunctional computer, then another hour researching and planning this menu and then shopping at the farmers market, Trader Joes and Whole Foods...I privately think she’s going to be asleep on a soft bed of tofu before the main course gets ready, and I can’t blame her.
As the turnips get sliced, we tackle the age old question: Dave Matthews, dull-witted or perpetually stoned? I personally don’t think it’s an either/or answer, folks. Let’s just say the guy who mumbled his way through an NPR interview today is the same guy who told Maxim back in ‘95 that he wished his nose was a penis because of how much he loves sex.
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| Also, there's this thing he does with his face. |
Now that we've alienated half our readers, our first obstacle appears: the turnip stew recipe is MASSIVE. We cut the amount of turnips from 3 to 2, debate how many carrots to put in without having it turn into carrot stew, and express varying degrees of dubiousness...
Alex: This recipe sucks!
Deb: This recipe is great!
Jim: Have you ever made this recipe before?
Deb: Of course not.
Jim: Have you ever spoken with anyone who’s made any recipes from this cookbook?
Deb: No...I just believe that anything Alex feels about a recipe is Wrong, until empirical evidence forms to back him up. Therefore this recipe is GOOD
Alex feels, Dear Reader, that the cookbook Deb is using tonight contains the sorts of recipes where, if you asked your grandmother how an item got made and then wrote down exactly what she told you, you’d get results like these. To Deb this implies “down-home cooking”...to Alex this implies “looming disaster”.
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| A skull on its cover...the mark of Quality Cookbooks |
*Alex sobs quietly*
We decide to leave out the collard green stems (because they are disgusting).
Deb is now insulting the cooking philosophy of “no fat, no flavor”, implying its an artifact of patriarchal 20th century thought which has no place in a modern kitchen. She’ll show us with this menu...she’ll SHOW US ALL.
Three minutes later we look at the bbq tofu recipe, which requires us to cook it in oil. Fatty, fatty oil. C’est la vie.
Deb begins prepping the homemade bbq sauce, helped by sous chef “the tofu recipe just says ‘pour a bottle of bbq sauce in’! What the hell!“ Alex. It calls for ¼ cup of worcestershire sauce; we bid a sad adieu to the vegan nature of this meal. It also calls for ¾ of a cup of bourbon and we have slightly less than ½ cup, so we supplement it with whiskey. As one does.
My pepsi bottle is less than ½ full so I supplement it with whiskey. As one does.
“Okay. I’ll do whatever y’all want, Deb.”--Alex, acknowledging where the credit and blame for this meal go.
Deb and McKayla share their dismay at the cookbook.
Alex begins making the tortillas for our dessert enchiladas, which is a surprisingly gymnastic recipe calling for boiling water to be poured into a little hollow in the middle of a mound of flour while butter fumes are waved across the top but not allowed to touch it...seriously, it’s a seven paragraph process. The bbq sauce? Four sentences.
Jim continues to work his magic as the middleman between Hungry Deb and Dubious About This Cookbook Alex. He fields Deb’s pensive question about how couscous would taste mixed in with the stew (terrible).
While we cook, we discuss an artifact that peaked in the 90s--not Dave Matthews this time, but ultimate frisbee. We’re told that because frisbee(tm) is a trademarked product, at some point they had to just call it Ultimate, or in some (hopefully rare) cases “Ultimate Disc”. Which sounds to us like a special attack Voltron shoots, but what do we know...
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| FEAR THE ULTIMATE DISC |
“Remember how every time we tried to sweeten a dessert with dates it turned out horrible and made Brian cry?”--Jim, losing his Trusted Middleman status.
“Do we have any vegetable boullion?”
“Yes--I put it under there to remind us of our glorious past”--Alex, still sous’ing his heart out.
We test the stew--Deb insists it’s good, but her face says otherwise. We team up to doctor it--maybe adding some collard greens and spices will help.
We note with dismay that the tortilla dough needs to chill for an hour.
The soup is arguably ready; it’s too hot for some of us, just right for...no, wait, the spicy afterburn bollixes everyone. It’s not exactly the most attractive food we’ve ever cooked...honestly, it’s not the most attractive thing I’ve ever scraped out of the inside of a cooking pot after a long night as a dishwasher...but it’s not that different from other vegetarian stews we’ve made. Considering all the trouble with the cookbook, maybe that counts as a win?
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| So....much....BROWN.... |
Deb is newly dubious about the vegetables in the bbq tofu recipe...we take a closer look at the recipe and see that it calls for sauteeing it and some vegetables, then baking the darn thing, and THEN letting it all sit for a while.
The collard greens, at least, are pretty straightforward--we sautee them up until they’re tender and we’re done. They’re boiling in no time...which means we face the task of deciding what constitutes “tender”.
The granny smith apples, which were on a tree in western Mass yesterday, are delicious, we’re happy to note. It’s tempting to just eat them while we slice them instead of cutting them into the right size for the apple enchiladas. Mmm apples. (It’s 8:06 and I’m starting to get peckish).
We’re experimenting to see if a raw potato can take out some of the hot heat kick in the stew. Science!
Jim notes that our cookbook tonight, “The Dirty South Cookbook”, also includes ‘white bean bruscetta’ and crepes! He is struggling to find the recipe for the apples, and the sheer amount of butter--1/2 cup--causes even him to shake his head and say “worst cookbook ever”. Deb insists that it’s fine, it just requires a little improvisation! Jim counters by pointing out the syrup the next part of the recipe calls for, without any explanation for where the syrup came from...but it’s okay, REALLY it is, we’re flexible.
Alex is about to put the tofu in the oven...while the recipe calls for it to be swimming in sauce, the strength of the sauce we’ve made causes Deb to feel we should be less about “swimming” and more about “wading”. Maybe just “splashing”. Tricky.
8:24 and we’re still plugging away; we’re flouring and trying to roll out the tortillas, but just MAYBE they haven’t chilled enough...or maybe we didn’t knead it enough...or maybe it just needs more water. We forge ahead!
We’re nervous about the vinegar in the bbq sauce, but hopeful that as it bakes with the tofu it’ll lose a little of its bite.
And now we have a Very Special Moment...let’s put it this way. When there’s a pot on the stove with vegetables inside, it’s logical to think that it’s not just the top part of a double boiler, so of COURSE it’s safe to pour another two cups of broth in. And YET. And yet, my friends. The left side of the stove is now Lake Okeechobee.
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| Our Final Result |
Grades
Turnip Stew
Deb...F after my 5 tbs of hot sauce, C before that. But maybe D if it tastes good tomorrow
Alex...echoes Deb . It needed some love and improvisation.
Jim...F. not a huge fan of turnips.
Brian...For the amount of time and effort this recipe took, this would have needed to cure my sciatica and put money in my bank account to get an A. It. Did. Not. F
Collard Greens
Deb--would make them again, which means A-...as a base for sauce they're great.
Jim--B, in part because of how well they worked with BBQ sauce. On their own they were a bit bland.
Alex--C+ The boiling sorta makes sense for collard...however, the other vegetables didn't work.
Brian--B-. They tasted like greens. Meh.
BBQ tofu
deb--A or A-...thought the sauce worked really well and they were perfectly crispy.
Alex--B...don't like BBQ sauce very much! Was okay. Tough to get texture right... Inside tasted like BBQ sauce. Nice texture.
Jim--B, texture was good, better than expected
Brian--Maybe I was unlucky in my selection of which tofu cubes I got, but I’ve never had to hack tofu with a knife before. B-
Apple Enchiladas
Deb...A or A+, definitely want to make them right away again
Alex--we learned a lot about tortillas as we went. The tactic is something I'd never think of. A. A lot of room to explore there too. Enchilada to work with leads to lots of potential. Nobody makes Pie Sauce...
Jim..,A, it was surprisingly delicious, and the tortilla wasn't overly-crisped and blended with the filling very well.
Brian...A. I <3 granny smith apples.
That was Dave Matthews? On skimming, I thought it was Danny DeVito.
ReplyDeleteThe apple enchiladas sound good!