Deb's Night - Vegan with Vengeance!

Greetings internet!  We almost didn't make it to cooking club today, because it is so nice and Springlike outside, but alas, our commitment to blogging trumps any sort of prehistoric human desire to enjoy nice days.  Lucky you!

Anyway, it's Deb's night, which means we're all vegan and shit.  Today's cookbook of choice is Vegan With a Vengeance - written by Isa Chandra Moskowitz of Veganomicon fame.  In other words, this meal is going to be full of fat and freaking delicious.  I'm stoked!

We're making a strogonoff, which is made with seitan.  Seitan, by the way, was almost purchased at our local Asian palindrome number market (Super 88), but looked a little too sketchy, so we're going to make it ourselves!  Well, Deb, was going to just skip it, but I bullied her into it.  Whoops!  Anyway, seitan is made by boiling vital wheat gluten in a soy sauce broth, then slicing it and frying it.

"I don't want to be culturally insensitive, but anyone who makes this should be shot."

Much like Brian, this young man has
experienced stinky tofu.

Should we roast the vegetables, or sautee them?  Deb advocates for roasting, because it's more delicious, but I hold that sauteeing can also be delicious.  As long as you're not boiling (or "water sauteeing") it should be fine!

Tahini dressing

Jim is making Tahini dressing, which consists of blending tahini, garlic, parsley, balsamic, lemon juice, paprika and olive oil.  Should be good!

Wet recipe!

Brian enquires about arrowroot powder, which needs to dissolve in water before being used.  It's a light starch which has been used for centuries to thicken sauces, substitute for gluten, and otherwise amaze with its starchy goodness.  We're going to use it in the stroganoff to thicken the sauce!

Meanwhile, Deb amazes with her ability to follow the recipe for seitan, microplaning garlic like a boss. Unfortun

ately, the recipe follows her as well, right into the soy broth...

Brian, having completed making cake batter, is now shalloting for the stroganoff.  This is a very, very involved stroganoff, it seems!  In my brain, somehow stroganoff means 'pour condensed soup over noodles and bake it'.  I don't know if this is the same thing as stroganoff, but it sure as shallots didn't get this fancy.

Jim prefers Kale to Collards!

Deb reveals that while we are having stroganoff, the main dishes are actually the Kale, Asparagus and Brussels Sprouts.  Who knew?

The asparagus will be cooked (supposedly) by sautéing garlic and sesame oil and adding red pepper flakes and soy sauce.  While this deviates from the One True Way (roasting, see our illustrious past), it is following the recipe (we've also tried this before, with mixed results).

As everyone chops vegetables, we chat about Justin Bieber, and his latest string of delightful oddities.  Case in point:

Justin Bieber and...his monkey?

Why does this manchild have a monkey?  Why did he decide to take it with him to Germany?  Amazing.  It's only a matter of time until he starts to do some MJ or Britney Spears.  The Biebs needs a "barometer of normal" - shockingly, Deb has volunteered!  Huh.

"I like MGMT and long walks on the beach."

In completely unrelated news, my colleages in hippieville are planning a FLASH MOB choreographed dance (flash dance?) of Robyn's Call Your Girlfriend.  The dance involves a lot of ground humping and rolling around, so I suspect that this mob may be a bit challenging to organize, but potentially very, very awesome.

What is really amazing about Robyn, however, are her very, very bold outfits.  Check out this spectacular garment, described as "ghetto baroque".  It's a corset-belt made out of underwear waistbands.  Wow, lady.  You can read the details on this very style conscious blog.  I'll confess to owning pretty much just one pair of pants now, which I think might have a better claim to the term "ghetto baroque", but that's just me.

While I was on that little tangent, we had another cooking club disaster.  There aren't very many flat spaces in the Debri Kitchen, which means that when left to their own devices, sometimes things find the final available flat space...

Shit.

Vitally wheatly glutinous, it's seitan!

Fortunately, we still have two main vegetable dishes that haven't been destroyed yet.  The stroganoff continues it's shallotey journey, and now the mushrooms and red wine (??) have gone into the prostroganoff.  Next up is the seitan, which has boiled and now needs to cook, to replace the beef which normally goes in stroganoff.

So...the asparagus, which was going to be sauteed, is now being roasted...because, hey, then we don't need to use another burner.  And, it is the one true way, anyway, so hey!  Victory!

Breaking news, French Vanilla soy creamer just entered our stroganoff.

And, this is where my live blogging ended.  Let me reflect back to that moment, where you taste something and realize that you have fucked up SO HARD.   Like, worse than when we dropped the brussels sprouts on the ground.  Because once you go French Vanilla, there is no 5 second rule.  Epic fail.

Anyway, I took this opportunity to try to "save the day", which in this case, consisted of rinsing off all of that delightful fat and red wine and cooked shallot bit in order to get rid of the vile French Vanilla.  It was sort of OK.  We added it back in with some cream (sorry, vegans!) and tried to reinfuse some flavor.  You'll just have to wait and see how we did.

Anyway, we sauteed the kale and stirred it up with the Goddess dressing, and put our roasted asparagus on a plate, and here's what it looks like:

VENGEANCE IS OURS!

Oh yeah, remember that cake?  Well...uh...I don't, honestly.  It's now been a few weeks since we made it.  There was some pouring of things on top of cooked cake.  It was kind of pudding-y and vegan.  And a bit forgettable.

You know what else we did?  We made Vitamix Ice Cream!  How did we do it?

	Deb	Bri	Jim	Alex
Stroganoff	A.  Tastes like the real thing to me!	Hmm...the sauce is an A, the seitan is a B+, the noodles are...whole wheat.	B-.  I can still taste the vanilla.	B.  The first bite with the seitan and the noodles and sauce was good.  However, the seitan lingers...
Kale	Not 100% thrilled with it.  What is that?  To me it’s undercooked, but I like my vegetables cooked more.  Maybe I didn’t put enough sauce on...B-	B-.  The tahini sauce is pretty good.  It can’t hide the face that it’s kale, though.  I’d pay as much as 4.95 for this...	B.  The kale would have benefitted from marinating in lemon juice.  That would have brightened the dressing a little.  The dressing was pretty good!	A-.  I like kale.  I like the dressing.  They go well together!  The longer the cooked kale sits, the shittier it gets.  I think this is reflected in the prior grades.
Asparagus	I barely remember the asparagus.  B+ maybe?  There wasn’t enough salt...	A-.  It’s tasty - I enjoy asparagus in general.  It’s sopping up the above sauces, too!	This is the only way I would eat asparagus.  It needs more salt and withery dessicated.  A-	B.  It was pretty much an afterthought, so I don’t think I got to eat it while it was hot and fresh.  Also, could use salt...
Cake	It wasn’t...y’know...bad...but it was a B- overall experience.  It needed some raspberry or something.	B-.  It’s gooey.  If you’re going to use maple syrup you might as well make something dedicated to maple syrup.  Butter and eggs are pretty essential in a decent cake...	C-.  I don’t even think raspberry would help it much.  The parts that were well baked didn’t have delicious flavor.	C+.  It tastes very vegan.  Too sugary and not rich enough.  It reminds me of Snackwells Devil’s Food Cakes
Ice Cream	C- for sure.  It was pretty much a failure I never want to experience again.	I’d give it a D.  I am tapping an ice crystal with my spoon and making an audible noise.	I would give it a D.  It was runny ice milk.	Making the vine was so much fun!