Vegan MoFo 26: A Reason to Pay What I Did for Those Mushrooms

Once you've reached the point that you'll pay $11 for mushrooms, you may as well pay $14. Or so I've been told.

At the Baltimore Farmers' Market there is a really nice group of mushroom farmers that bring a nice variety every week. I've bought exciting new kinds of mushrooms there before, but never felt justified buying one of the mix trays.

That changed when I chose Mushroom Hash from How to Pick a Peach as one of my fall recipes to try. The recipe calls for a pound and a half of mixed mushrooms, and I figured I may as well go balls to the wall. Incidentally, that phrase is about airplane acceleration, so let's keep this clean, yeah?

I was looking over the $11 trays, but my companion pointed out that I may as well throw down the extra $3 dollars and experience the taste of "deluxe."

So I did.

Then I made Mushroom Hash for breakfast one day. The only changes I made were to substitute ingredients that I didn't have on hand. I used apple juice with a bit of vinegar to stand in for white wine, and almond milk instead of cream.

I was almost late to work because I was having seconds. This is a decadent breakfast option, and I won't hesitate to buy exotic mushrooms again if I'm entertaining and need to impress. It was an easy dish to make, and took under 45 minutes to do, start to finish. All of the ingredients seemed to work to bring out the flavor of the mushrooms, and then that was imparted to the potatoes.

I know I said that I'd wait to try recipes from all the seasons before reviewing the book, but I don't think I need to. I will, but really, just check out the book already.

Vegan MoFo 24: Asian Pear Crisp with Walnut Topping

I had an Asian pear once awhile back, and I wasn't really wild about it. It was pretty, but a little syrupy-sweet for me. I was intrigued, though, by the promise of a fruit crisp flavored with a bit of bourbon, like the one in How to Pick a Peach. Besides, this recipe specifically mandated the use of ramekins for baking, and I'm always looking for an excuse to use them.

So we made Asian Pear Crisp with Walnut Topping to take to our engagement with friends. The recipe called for 3 pears, or 1.5 lbs. My pears were a little small, so I had to use about 10 of them to get enough. Coring the little buggers was a pain, but probably the worst part of the job.

I will complain about the two setbacks though. First, I had toasted the walnuts for the topping, and I suppose I didn't give them enough time to cool. So instead of the crumbly textured dough I was supposed to end up with, I had a buttery spread on my hands. I topped the fruit mix with it anyway though, and the dessert still ended up smashing. It was just more of a smashing cobbler than a crisp.

The second came when I was finally using my box of Healthy Top. I take issue with the name, because come on, dessert is not healthy, but I was still excited. I refrigerated it prior to opening, and started whipping. Then I noticed a after-factory sticker on the tetra-pack box that said "Oops!!!! Freeze Immediately And Whip As Soon As Possible." So I bought this off a shelf, but I have to freeze immediately? What the hell?

Well it tasted awful. So we snagged some vanilla So Delicious on the way out, and it was great. I'm just bummed that I didn't get to have the bourbon cream recommended by the book.

All of that aside, this knocked everyone's socks off. Everyone loved it, especially me! And I felt like I had brought it, so to speak, on the behalf of fancy cocktail hour vegans everywhere. This was no more difficult to make than a plain old apple crisp - in fact it had fewer ingredients than many of the crisps I've made over time. But it sounds so showy, and it has bourbon-soaked raisins in it.

Vegan MoFo 23: Pasta with Broccoli and (Tofurky) Sausage

So as promised, we did the big farmers' market shop this weekend. We got there a little earlier than usual, which is nice because the market gets uncomfortably crowded by mid-morning.

I had already chosen three fall recipes from How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons, so we set out to find our ingredients. Surprisingly, broccoli for the Pasta with Broccoli and Sausage was the biggest challenge. There was plenty of broccoli, but a lot of it looked like it was harvested too late into its growing cycle.

I should mention that reading that book reminded me to support my local farmers, but I think it also has influenced me to be a dick about produce. In fact, I had a giggle fit as I watched a shopper direct her friend to smell "that sweet broccoli aroma" on a particularly yellowed and crumbly head of broccoli.

"That is exactly what you should be looking for," she explained and looked happy when her friend bought the most pathetic stalk of the bunch.

I did find broccoli that was in good shape though, so I was able to move on. The broccoli was huge, and I could have multiplied the recipe by 6 from this one head. We made the dish that night, replacing the sausage with Tofurky Italian Sausages. We went ahead and used the whole package, and added a little more broccoli than called for. I was feeling lazy, so rather than making some proper Parmesan substitute, we just dumped a bunch of nutritional yeast in the pot.

At the first bite, we decided that the dish needed some heat, and we added some red pepper flakes. Perfect! We couldn't stop eating it, which is normally fine, but we had cocktail plans with people who had made an effort to provide vegan snacks, so we wanted to go with our appetites intact.

This dish will be in the regular rotation, I'm sure. I really want to try it with some crumbled tempeh in the future, and red pepper flakes will always be added with the nutritional yeast.

This dish went so well that I have high hopes for the Mushroom Hash that I'll be making next.

Vegan MoFo 19: How to Pick a Peach

One thing that I had been meaning to do after my move to Baltimore was get a library card. That was taken care of for me when I started working for The Village Learning Place. Once I had my card, I found the cookbook section and started to browse. Sadly, there are no vegan cookbooks, but there are vegetarian ones that seem to be perpetually checked out - bittersweet I suppose. I also found a particularly vegan-friendly book, thanks to a recommendation from a coworker.

How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons is a book that approaches everyone's favorite buzz phrases about eating seasonally and locally and attempts to cover the "The Search For Flavor From Farm to Table." Parsons approaches this search by weaving together several aspects of produce selection.

One thing that struck me immediately was the organization of this book. Following the Table of Contents, there was a list of the fruits and vegetables alphabetically, and then all of the recipes divided into course categories. This bodes well for a book that has several functions. It's all well and good to provide recipes, but for we meal planners, a merely chronological list just won't do it.

The introduction provides a brief primer on the history and economics of American agriculture. Parsons explains how a modernizing nation changed its habits, how grocery stores came to be, and how farmers' markets went from being common to scarce before enjoying a renaissance that seems to be getting stronger. He also highlights how convenience and availability have hurt our enjoyment of food, and how the organic movement isn't exactly what we think it is.

The other "modern irony" he discusses was more thought-provoking. Parsons points out that we have access to more ingredients than ever, but that most of them are not very good, and certainly not worth spending money on. He specifically points to how foodies may have obscure knowledge of techniques or fancy vocabulary, but they still don't know how to choose produce at the market. This is important because, "when you start with good ingredients, you finish with great dishes."

This makes me wonder how many people who claim that they could never give up meat/cheese/whatever really just couldn't give up such heavy flavor. How many of those people would be won over if they could choose and prepare amazing plant-based dishes for themselves?

What I really liked though was that the tone of the introduction inspired me to think about these things without being too assertive. I like assertive, but a lot of people are turned off by food politics because of arrogance, condescension, or outright cruelty. "I'm not one of those preachy vegans," is a cliché for a reason right? The introduction basically says that there are some things that people could benefit from knowing, and that's a great way to start a conversation.

From there, the book is organized by season, each one having several fruits and veggies under it. For each plant (or sometimes groups of similar plants), Parsons provides several pages of general information and then summaries under the headings: Where They're Grown, How to Choose, How to Store, How to Prepare, and One Simple Dish. All are very informative, but One Simple Dish is the most interesting to me because it would come in handy when you have something that needs to be used NOW, or when you have last minute guests to feed.

In addition to these quick dishes, each food has a few simple recipes to showcase it. These recipes aren't all vegan, or even vegetarian, but for the most part, the recipes are meant to feature vegetables and fruits, so making them vegan is simple.

Also interesting to the vegan who loves food politics (don't we all?) are the essays between each season. In the first, "The Plant Designers: Factories in the Field," Parsons uses the strawberry as an example to discuss how scientists and farmers mutate and manipulate breeds over time to produce new varieties of produce. GMOs as a serious issue are touched on briefly, but the focus is on the goals and the results of efforts to make produce that is robust, and ultimately profitable. While you may or may not agree with Parsons on everything, you can probably learn something or become interested in learning something thanks to these.

Finally, throughout the book are pages that are like sidebars; they aren't listed in the table of contents and they provide helpful bits of information. Some of them are about produce, like "When It's OK to Buy Unripe," while others talk about recipe concepts like Clafoutis or Souffles. As a lover of the sidebar, I'm all in with these.

Now nothing drives me crazy like a person who writes a cookbook review having never made any of the recipes, but this isn't strictly a cookbook. Plus, I won't review the cooking aspects yet. However, I will say that this is a book worth having, or at least reading. The tips on selection lined up with what I already knew, but I still learned quite a bit. I'm excited to go flex my new muscles at the Farmers' Market this weekend. Additionally, the information about agriculture reminded me why farmers' markets and food education are so important. Not only can you cook better food, but you can do right by your local farmers and community by making an effort to send your money directly to them.

I've selected three recipes from the fall section to make this week. I should be able to pick up most of the ingredients at the farmers' market. I will naturally report back. I know I can't really review this book completely until I've sampled all the seasons, so I'll revisit it throughout the year.

If you can't stand the suspense, take a sneak peak with this 2007 NPR story, Russ Parsons: In Search of Quality Produce. It excerpts the section on Artichokes, complete with recipes.