Artichokes for All...

In the spirit of all-inclusiveness, I’ve decided to make all my recipes convertible between vegetarian and non-vegetarian versions. If you’re suddenly feeling skeptical, you might be surprised that all this means, basically, is that if you’re a vegetarian you would use vegetarian “sausage,” and if you’re not vegetarian you can use regular, whole-hog – ok, bad pun intended – sausage. When I was a vegetarian, I was often perplexed by the huge stylistic gulf between many vegetarian and non-vegetarian recipes. Really, with all the wonderful vegetarian “meat” products out there (the “ground beef,” “sausage patties,” and “chicken strips” are my personal favorites, and are usually available in the freezer section of most grocery stores) it is totally possible to make vegetarian versions of nearly any meat-based recipe. Conversely, my non-vegetarian friends could easily take some of my vegetarian recipes and fix them with “real” chicken, beef, etc. Everyone should get to enjoy, right?

This recipe started out as a pasta dish, and Zach and I liked it so much that two nights ago we fixed it with just the veggies and the sausage, and no pasta! The flavors complement each other simply and beautifully - tangy, tender artichokes, smokey/spicy sausage, and crunchy, nutty edamame... Zach’s final assessment was “you should put this in your cookbook.” Since the cookbook is currently an idea and multiple files on my laptop, which might keep this wonder of edamame and artichokes in the lonely depths of a Microsoft word document for a while, here it is now!

Artichoke and Edamame Salad

4 T olive oil
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
8 oz andouille turkey sausage, sliced OR 8 oz vegetarian “sausage” patties, cut into cubes
1 lb. frozen shelled edamame, thawed and drained
2 (6-8 oz) jars marinated artichoke hearts, drained
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

~ In a large skillet over medium-high heat, sauté the onion and garlic in the olive oil until the onions are limp and beginning to brown.
~ Add the sausage and stir occasionally until the sausage is a bit browned.
~ Reduce the heat to medium, stir in the edamame and artichoke hearts, and cook until heated through.
~ Season to taste with salt and pepper, if desired, and serve warm!
~ (this is also wonderful folded into a batch of whole wheat pasta…)

Generations of Cornbread

I’m a writer, and I don’t live in New York. I don’t live in California either, for that matter. I don't work at one of the big New York publishing companies, nor am I located amidst the enviable food writers of California’s organic markets. I’m a southern girl. With all due respect to anywhere not located in the Southern US, New York and California included – both of which I adore – I wouldn’t trade my address for anything.

Where I live, the bread is always warm, I can wear T-shirts until December, and you can strike up a conversation with the person next to you in line at the grocery store because people are just that friendly. Your co-workers hug you after you’ve only known them for a week, you can ask for fishing advice when you stop for gas, and you can say “y’all” during a job interview without being told you need to modulate the professionalism of your diction.

This soil is part of my veins. I can still remember my grandmother sitting next to me when I was small, telling me the story of the silver tea set that now sits in my parents’ living room. Not all of my ancestors survived the civil war, but after Sherman tore apart the South that tea set remained, wrapped in quilts and sunken in the swamp behind the small inn my great-great-grandparents owned. Their recipes survived too. My grandmother still fixes cornbread and brown bread the way her mother taught her, and the way her mother before her taught her, and so on, somewhere along the way figuring out adaptations for modern ovens and baking pans. I tried to add my own little update to the cornbread recipe, discovering that baking it in one 8X8 baking pan – instead of two loaf pans – keeps the bread perfectly moist. When I called my mother excitedly, and told her of my discovery, her response was prompt and horrified: “You can’t change that recipe! Our family has always been baking cornbread that exact way!” Well, I did hold onto my one little change, but I still think of the generations who passed this recipe down to me every time I bake cornbread. In celebration, then, of this wonderful part of the US where I’m fortunate enough to live, here is my family’s cornbread recipe – which, I’m willing to argue, will turn out the most delicious, slightly sweet, pure-tasting cornbread you’ve ever sampled.

As for me, and my writing? The wonderful thing about writing is that you can harbor your pen, pencil, or laptop anywhere. While it may take me a bit longer to meet just the right publisher for the cookbook, essays, and poems currently in progress, in the meantime I can blog, and mail manuscripts. And bake cornbread.


Our Family’s Cornbread

¾ cup turbinado sugar or white sugar
1/3 cup olive oil
4 eggs
2 cups yellow cornmeal
2 cups flour
4 tsp baking poweder
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk (vanilla soymilk works well too)

~ Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8X8 baking pan.
~ Cream together the sugar and olive oil.
~ Add the eggs, and mix well.
~ Add all the remaining ingredients, and mix again until combined.
~ Pour the batter into the baking pan, and bake for 40 to 45 minutes – until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
~ Enjoy warm, with plenty of butter…

Onion-Infused Hamburgers

I cannot take any credit for the scrumptious hamburgers we had for supper last night, and the Sunday before. While I wondered how two people could possibly pile up this much laundry over a mere 4 day Thanksgiving trip, Zach whipped up the juiciest and most flavorful hamburgers I’ve ever tasted. New to cooking meat as I am, I tackled my first hamburger prep about a month ago, and since then I’ve discovered that a primary challenge – especially for grill-less burger cooking during these chilly months – is getting the burgers to cook through without drying out. Zach’s idea of mixing the ground beef with an onion and garlic paste added just the right amount of moisture and flavor for a burger that cooks like a charm and melts in your mouth…

Onion Infused Hamburgers

1 large onion, cut into wedges
1 T minced garlic
1 lb. lean ground beef
Cajun spice mix to taste (or salt, black pepper, and a bit of cayenne pepper if you can’t find Cajun spice)
1 large onion, thickly sliced
¼ cup + 2 T canola oil

~ In a food processor, blend the onion wedges and the garlic until it becomes a smooth, slightly liquid paste.
~ In a large bowl, mix the onion/garlic paste, and the Cajun spice with the ground beef. Shape the ground beef into 6 patties.
~ In a non-stick skillet over medium high heat, brown the onion slices in 2 T of canola oil. Remove the onion slices from the skillet, and set aside.
~ Add the remainder of the canola oil to the skillet, and reduce the heat to medium. Brown the ground beef patties on each side, then cover the skillet and cook the patties until no pink remains in the middle.
~ Serve topped with the onion slices… Great on a toasted bun with mustard and mayo, or all by itself!

Universal Gravy

We arrived home last night after a whirlwind trip to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. In my family, the Thanksgiving holiday is an exercise in negotiation and compromises. Among the 9 of us gathered this year around my parents’ homemade plywood (yes, plywood, spruced up with a new tablecloth) dining room table, were two vegans, 1 vegetarian, 4 non-vegetarians, 1 diabetic, and 1 no-sodium dieter. We did surprisingly well – my mother stuffed vegetarian “turkey” inside the rice dressing (as opposed to stuffing the dressing inside the turkey), I fixed an extra, salt-free batch of all the side dishes, and the sweet potato pie came out splendidly with minimal added sugar. However, for as long as I can remember, the one thing our Thanksgiving feast hasn’t managed to include has been the gravy. According to my grandmother, such an omission in a southern household is nothing less than a travesty. For the past few years I’d commit myself (thankfully silently) to composing a vegetarian gravy that actually tasted like gravy, as opposed to something akin to brown glue, but always, amidst a flurry of seemingly more interesting pie baking, I would dismiss the task at the last minute. This summer, however, way before Thanksgiving, I made gravy – almost by accident. I don’t even remember the exact inspiration for the event, but suddenly I was pouring something gooey and delicious – and vegetarian - into a gravy boat. When even non-vegetarians approved the result, I knew I had Thanksgiving – and year-round – gravy.

Year-Round Vegetarian Gravy

½ cup + 3 T olive oil
1 (12 oz) package vegetarian “sausage” patties, chopped into ½” pieces
8 oz mushrooms (shitake, portabella, or button mushrooms are all great)
1 large onion, chopped
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups vegetable broth

~ In a large skillet, brown the vegetarian sausage in 2 T olive oil over medium-high heat. When the “sausage” is nice and brown on the outside, remove it from the pan. Add an additional 1 T of olive oil, and sauté the mushrooms and onion until they soften. Remove the mushrooms from the skillet, toss them in with the sausage, and reduce the heat to medium.
~ Add the ½ cup olive oil to the now-empty skillet, and slowly add the flour (about 1 T at a time) while stirring constantly. Keep stirring and heating until the mixture has cooked down to a thick paste (you can add more or less flour as you like, depending on how thick you like your gravy – the paste can range from very thick to slightly soupy).
~ Making sure to continue stirring, pour in the vegetable broth. Keep stirring until the gravy reaches the desired thickness (around 10 minutes). Remove from heat, stir in the “sausage,” mushrooms, and onions, and there you are! If it cools down a bit before serving, just heat it up again – in the microwave, the oven, or on the stovetop.
~ The gravy is delicious over any kind of vegetarian “meats” or real beef/poultry/etc, and of course on mashed potatoes… You can also take my father’s approach and pour it across everything on your plate!

Tiramisu is Good for You

If someone asks "so, what can you cook?" (a frequent question during a variety of conversations, ranging from small talk to my frequent attempts to offer to cook for people in exchange for favors such as cat-sitting and rides to and from the airport), I usually blithely respond "anything and everything!" I would do well to re-examine the veracity of this statement, however, because, truth be told, while my fondness for experimentation has led me to cook a ton of stuff, including lebna cheese, pad thai, and vegan chocolate pudding, I have, until recently, steered clear of, well, fluffy desserts. They are time consuming, for one. This hasn't daunted me in the past, though - my college roommate and I once spent the better part of the day and into the night (until 2AM, to be exact), producing handmade fig and goat cheese wontons. For the most part, I had simply dismissed creamy confections as irredeemably unhealthy. After all, it's hard to justify a steady diet of recipes that begin with "beat 5 egg yolks together with 2 cups heavy cream..." However, with my newfound conviction that everything delicious can also be good for our bodies as well as our taste-buds, I recently set out to test the waters of - and redeem - tiramisu. Why tiramisu, in particular? Paging through a magazine over coffee one morning, I discovered that "tiramisu" means, in Italian, "pick me up." I was thereby instantly convinced that tiramisu simply had to have some nutritious benefits, since it evidently was so good for the soul (really, who could act gloomy after a spoonful of a soft, mocha-flavored cloud?).

Tiramisu is one of those incredibly complex looking dishes that turns out to be deceptively simple. I had designated an entire afternoon to tiramisu assembly, and, half an hour after I began, found myself with a completed dessert in the fridge and more than enough time to clean the fish tank, rake leaves, and still add roasted cauliflower and mashed potatoes to the menu.

The ultimate result - this dessert that breezed its way into my fridge on the first try - is a bit different from classic tiramisu, but it is the accomplishment of the seemingly impossible - healthy tiramisu. It's still a bit more caloric than most of the recipes I dream up, but it's relatively low in fat, doesn't have any of the calories alcohol usually adds to the dish (without sacrificing a bit of flavor, I promise), and is a good source of calcium (which is quite lacking in most diets). All in all, it's not too far away from a bagel and cream cheese (and, as wonderful as bagels are, I think it's a much more effective "pick me up...")

White Chocolate Mocha Tiramisu

1 cup top quality white chocolate chips

1/2 cup water

1 tsp vanilla

8 oz. whipped cream cheese

8 oz. light cream cheese

1/2 cup turbinado sugar

1/3 cup brewed coffee

20 ladyfingers, each separated in half length-wise

cinnamon, for dusting

~ In a small saucepan over medium heat, stir the chocolate chips and the water until the chips are melted.

~ Remove from the heat, and whisk in the vanilla.

~ With an electric mixer, beat the cream cheeses together until fluffy.

~ Add the white chocolate mixture, and blend until combined.

~ Pour in the sugar and the coffee, and blend again until smooth.

~ In a round bowl or baking dish with a flat bottom, arrange a layer of ladyfinger halves, rounded side down. Spread 1/3 of the creamed mixture on top. Repeat with two more layers of ladyfingers and the remaining 2/3 of the creamed mixture. Finish with a final layer of ladyfingers, rounded side up this time. Dust the top with cinnamon. Cover and chill for at least 2 hours before serving...