Although his father used to spend days planning huge vegan feasts whenever we’d visit my in-laws, Mark’s mother doesn’t enjoy cooking any more than my mother does, so I’m not going to be getting a lot of family recipes from her. What I did get for Christmas from her this year, however, was a big ole bag of South Carolina food stuffs.

Most of Mark’s family moved to Charleston a couple of years ago. Some people, when I tell them I’m heading down there for a visit, will say, “oh, the food is so good down there!” I haven’t found that to be the case, however. Not only is it rather meat-centric, but EVERYTHING is fried. One time, somewhat out of desperation, Mark ordered a BLT sans the B and was shocked to discover the tomatoes were fried! On his sandwich! It was…disturbing. Asian restaurants are few and far between, and not of the quality we’re used to up here in our little Asian wonderland of Northern Virginia. There actually are a few veggie-friendly restaurants on James Island, where they live, including a couple that have vegan things right on the menu, so it’s not completely hopeless, but it is a lot different than it is here. And if you stray too far from the more populous locales, the vegan food situation gets sketchy quickly. Which is too bad because once you get past all the meat and the fried stuff, there’s something to be said for Southern cuisine.

Anyway, my mother-in-law frequently gives me Charleston-related food items, which I love. The jalapeno jelly I often slather on my bagels over cream cheese came from her. And tonight while putting away groceries, I found an adorable little bag of Carolina rice that she had given me for Christmas. I’d been puzzling over what to make for dinner, and in fact, had planned to just pick something up from the hot bar at Whole Foods before finding it decidedly un-vegan-friendly this evening. And since Smark is a riceasaurus, and the recipe on the back of the rice bag called for bacon, which meant I could use up some of that leftover UnPork from last night, I figured it would be the perfect thing to throw together tonight.

Here’s the bag of rice:

Isn’t it cute?! I’m trying to think of something crafty to do with the bag once the rice is all gone. The only thing I’ve come up with so far is a pin cushion, or it’s a pretty good size for making into a cold pack. Funnily enough, I’d fill it with rice for such an application.

If you can’t get your hands on genuine South Carolina heirloom rice like this, any long grain rice should suffice. It’s cool to use non-mass marketed stuff like this though. The following recipe comes directly from the back of the bag of rice. Ordinarily I’m a very throw-whatever-together kind of chef, but it seems like this week I’ve been a slave to recipes! I’m really having fun with it, though. So here we go:

Carolina Red Rice

1 1/4 cup Carolina Gold rice (or any long grain white rice)
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
1 small jalapeno pepper, diced (I used two because that’s how we do things in our household)
1 1/2 cup good quality canned crushed tomato (I used 1 14.5 ounce can fire-roasted)
1 cup vegan chicken stock, vegetable stock or water
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 thin slices UnPork, diced (optional)
2 Tbsp vegan “bacon bits”
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme or 1/4 tsp dried
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 Tbsp sugar (or 15 drops stevia – I find it so much more convenient than dragging out the sugar canister)
6 dashes Tabasco (or to taste)
2 tsp salt (or to taste)
1 tsp black pepper

The UnPork is optional because the bacon bits will sub for the bacon that is called for in the original recipe and provide all the taste you need. But since I had the leftover UnPork I threw it in to provide a little bacon-like texture, which the bacon bits don’t really do as they don’t get crispy. Possibly you could just fry them instead of the UnPork and they’d get crispy. I don’t know.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. If you do use the UnPork, put the olive oil into a frying pan, bring it up to temperature, and then add the diced UnPork:

When it’s crispy …

… add the onions, jalapeno peppers, thyme, bay leaf, soy sauce, “bacon bits”, salt, and pepper (or if you didn’t use the UnPork, just throw all of this into the pan to start with).

Fry for a couple of minutes, then add the tomatoes, sugar or stevia, and Tabasco:

Cook for five minutes, then add the stock or water and the rice. Bring to a simmer again.

Pour everything into an oven-safe casserole dish:

Place a lid on it or cover with aluminum foil and bake for 40 minutes or until rice is done. Remove from oven and let rest for 5 minutes, then remove bay leaf and fluff with a fork.

While the rice was cooking, I wondered what I could serve with it. I had harvested these adorable purple peppers from our garden earlier in the day:

Okay, that’s a lie. The horrible gardening skills I had before have done nothing but get worse this summer. I’m pathetic, really. I got those cute peppers from the farmer’s market.

God, I’m such a liar. Although I LOVE farmer’s markets, I hardly ever drag myself out of bed before 11 a.m. on weekends, which makes them next to impossible for me attend. I bought those peppers at Whole Foods. I will have you know, however, that they ARE from a local farmer. If you consider Pennsylvania local to Northern Virginia. I’m going to pretend that I do.

I bought them because they were cute, cheap, and organic. They seemed like they’d be a good accompaniment to the rice because Southern cuisine calls for bell pepper in practically everything as part of the “holy trinity”. I’d have considered stuffing the peppers with the rice, but that would delay dinner for too long, so I decided to simply roast the peppers and serve them NEXT to the rice. Same basic taste, right?

Check out my pepper roaster:

My collection of kitchen gadgets knows no bounds, does it? This one was little neater when I had a gas stove (how I miss thee, gas stove), but to my surprise, it works with the electric stove nearly as well. And actually before I had this gadget, I used to roast peppers directly on the gas burners, although that required one burner per pepper. You could also use a broiler, or probably a grill.

What I was not expecting was for the process of roasting to roast the purple right off those peppers!

They started to turn green as their skin charred!

After about 10 minutes of turning the peppers until they were uniformly charred (by the way, I can report that our smoke detector IS working) …

… I put them into a brown paper bag …

… for 10 more minutes. Then I rinsed them under running water and washed the blackened skins off:

Then I de-seeded them and just pulled them apart into bite-sized pieces.

And here’s the meal:

This was really good! Mark loved it. He ate all his peppers up before I even sat down next to him (I had to take the above picture before I could sit down to eat, of course), and when he started in on the rice, he was ecstatic. It was very flavorful and, since I used two jalapenos, nice and hot. I’m making a mental note to consider making this meal for his whole extended family during our next Charleston beach week!

In other news, here is my new invention:

It’s called the Anti-Tigger Shield. Hidden beneath those two domes are three proofing loaves of ciabatta bread. Tigger is FOREVER sitting on my bread dough, pizza dough, freshly-baked muffins…you name it. If it’s a baked good in any stage of its life cycle, Tigger wants to sit or walk on it. WELL NO MORE. TAKE THAT, TIGGER!

Aww, but he’s so cute I can’t stand it. Ok, you can walk on my dough, Tiggs.

I don’t know if any of you not related to me have been following the discussion in which I learned what pork is (it’s any pig meat, not just a certain type as I formerly believed) and was informed of all the forms of pork I used to eat as a child. Which is fine; I later saw the error of my ways, but I think we need to keep this information from my friend, Pig:

Pig is my traveling companion. We go on all sorts of adventures.

He often finds himself in trouble, I’m afraid.

We have traveled the world, though.

Anyway, within this pork discussion, my mother claimed she used to make pork chops although no one else in the family remembers any such incident of pork chop-making on my mother’s part. She did supply me with the barbecued pork chop recipe she used to allegedly make and I decided that the Smoked Seitan Butt and Green Beans recipe was such a surprise hit that I would veganize “my mother’s” pork chops!

I really hadn’t intended to do so until I was flipping through several cookbooks tonight, including Simply Heavenly!, and saw the UnPork recipes. Now since I never actually witnessed my mother making pork chops and have never consumed pork chops – I honestly have no idea what a pork chop even LOOKS like – I decided to just pick one of Abbott George’s four “pork” recipes and go with it. Although the ingredients are all his, I did alter the method slightly. Do I have any idea if this tastes remotely like pork? No. It’s actually pretty good though. And I was shocked to pull it out of the pressure cooker and find that it looked pretty much what I thought pork looked like; the color anyway. Which is a sort of a frankly unappetizing greyish white color.

I didn’t photograph the making of the UnPork, unfortunately. I was busy doing other things at the same time. Some of you are going to balk at the use of MSG, the use of which Abbott George makes an apologia in the introduction of the book. MSG doesn’t bother me. While I don’t think you should go willy-nilly throwing it into everything to make it taste better, there are times when its use can be justified. So I use it when it’s called for. If you don’t like MSG, just don’t use it. You might want to substitute soy sauce instead, or maybe just a little more salt, but I’m sure you can just omit it as well.

But on with the recipe:

UnPork 1
Adapted from Simply Heavenly! by Abbott George Burke

1 onion, chopped finely
6 Tbsp MSG
4 tsp salt
1 1/3 cup nutritional yeast
2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
3 tsp sage
4 tsp corn oil
8 cups water
2 cups vital wheat gluten

Mix together all ingredients except vital wheat gluten in a pressure cooker if you have one, or a Dutch oven if you don’t. Place the vital wheat gluten in a bowl and add 1 3/4 cup of the broth. Stir the gluten until it sticks together, then knead it with your hands until it forms a ball. You may want to do this before adding the onions to the broth so they aren’t incorporated into the gluten. I had a few holes in my finished gluten because of the onions, but this didn’t bother me. Bring the broth to a boil and simmer 5 minutes. Meanwhile, wrap the gluten up tightly in cheesecloth. Plunk the gluten into the pressure cooker or pot. If using a pressure cooker, bring it up to pressure and cook for 45 minutes, otherwise, cover the pot and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.

I did manage a picture of it sitting in the broth after being pressure-cooked:

The original version calls for mixing the vital wheat gluten with water and then cooking it in the broth. I thought it would be neat to incorporate the broth flavorings into the seitan. I think it was a good idea.

This is what it looks like when it’s done. This is really what I thought pork looked like. Scary!

Now for the recipe my mother found in her recipe box and may have made for some mystery family that the rest of us don’t know about. First, the original in her words:

Barbecued Pork Chops

2-4 pork chops
1 (15 oz.) can tomatoes
1/4 cup vinegar (I think I used cider vinegar)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. allspice
salt & pepper to taste

Brown chops in small amount of fat in electric frying pan; remove. Add remaining ingredients for sauce to drippings; cook for 5 minutes. Add meat to sauce. Cover and simmer for 1 hour or until tender.

Now my version:

1/2 recipe UnPork (see above)
1 14.5 oz can crushed tomatoes (I used diced and crushed them with an immersion blender)
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
sriracha to taste

The first step is take your electric frying pan, if you have one, and donate it to Good Will. I’m simply baffled by the whole concept of electric frying pans.

Next, heat your (preferably cast iron) frying pan over medium heat, then add a little oil. If you are using nicely seasoned cast iron, you don’t need a lot of oil. My burners are not level and all the oil pools on one side, so what I like to do is brush the whole bottom surface of the frying pan with oil using a pastry brush.

I don’t know what a pork chop looks like, so I just sliced the UnPork into 1/2″ slabs …

… and fried until golden brown on both sides.

Remove the UnPork, then add the remaining ingredients to the pan. I had to add sriracha because I have difficulty comprehending barbeque sauce that isn’t spicy. Let the sauce bubble for a couple of minutes.

Add the UnPork slices, spooning the sauce over the tops so they are covered.

Cover, reduce heat to medium low, and cook for half an hour or until the sauce has reduced somewhat.

I decided sauerkraut would be a good accompaniment to the pork chops. I have no idea what usually goes with pork chops.

The verdict? Mark really liked the seitan. He said it really tasted like pork, which is odd because he usually never says fake meat tastes anything like the real thing. He kept nabbing bits of the unused half and gobbling them up. It was slightly spicy from the red pepper flakes; just enough to have a little kick and make it interesting. The sauce was good, although I tasted it before adding the sriracha (which is not called for in the original) and was underwhelmed. With the sriracha, it was tasty. I would make it again.

Tigger approved.

And no, making this dish did NOT bring back any memories of my mother ever having made and served it, so I can’t say it’s a cherished family recipe or anything like that. But I did GET it from my family and it WAS pretty yummy. Since my mother has never been into cooking, I’m surprised to hear myself say this, but I think I’m going try veganizing some more family recipes…if we have any. Maybe my mom made some other interesting meals for the other family that got the pork chops all the time and she can give me those recipes.

Pork is somewhat of a mystery meat to me. In fact, until as recently as last week, I went around proclaiming I’ve never eaten pork in my life. I wasn’t raised vegetarian, or Jewish, or Muslim, we simply didn’t eat a wide variety of meats when I was growing up. All I really remember ever eating is ground beef, chicken, fish sticks, hot dogs, and Steak-Ums. My favorite was ham, but I only got that at my grandmother’s. Now, I know pork comes from pigs and ham comes from pigs, but still I don’t know if ham is a subset of pork or vice versa or what, and frankly, I don’t care to know. All I knew is my family at no time ever served me anything and called it “pork”, and as I became vegetarian at 15, I figured I’d never eaten it.

But then last weekend my mother told me that she and my aunt had made Smoked Butt and Green Beans, a family recipe she made from time to time when I was growing up, for my dad Saturday night, and it turns out that the “butt” is actually “pork butt”. So I guess I have eaten pork. I can remember laughing at the name of the meal when I was a kid and asking why it was called “butt” and my parents telling me it was the butt of the pig and me not believing them. Talk about avoiding the issue of where your food comes from! I thought someone was just being silly when they named the meal. I’ve always been an animal lover and I’m not sure I would have wanted to eat it if I had really thought it was an animal’s butt, but on the other hand, I was far from being a picky eater and loved meat as much as any other food until I started thinking about things more thoroughly. My mom recently transcribed parts of my baby book and apparently at even at three months, baby Renae ate “everything”.

Anyway, my mom included the recipe for Smoked Butt And Green Beans in her email with the note, “I guess you can’t really veganize it.” A-ha! Challenge alert! At first I wasn’t too interested in trying to veganize it because it’s so simple that much of the flavor must come from the “butt” and not only do I not care to eat stuff that tastes like meat, but I honestly haven’t the faintest idea what smoked butt or any type of pork tastes like. I do remember eating it, but no particular memory of the taste comes to mind. But then I found myself with some leftover seitan and some green beans for which I had no other plans, and I know that Smark likes smoky flavors, so I started thinking maybe I would veganize that recipe after all.

The important thing here, I think, is not to think you’re really eating pork or anything that tastes remotely like pork. I have no idea what pork tastes like, so all I tried to do was give it a smoky edge, even though my mom says smoked butt doesn’t taste that smoky to her and if it did, she wouldn’t like it. Other than that, the name, “Smoked Butt” is appropriate because the leftover chunk of seitan I had really did look like the butt of some seitan!

The original recipe, which my mother got from her mother, is thus:

1 peck green beans
5 lbs. potatoes (cut in pieces)
1 (2 lb.) smoked pork butt (cut in 1/4s)
1 onion
salt & pepper
2 tsp. sugar per lb. green beans

Put green beans and butt in large pot with onion, salt, pepper, and sugar. Cook on slow boil for about 4 hours. Add potatoes, bring to a boil again; and then cook on a slow boil for another 1/2 hours or until potatoes are done.

Pretty simple, eh? Well, enough blabbing from me: on with the veganizing! Choose your seitan wisely for this one. Because it’s such a simple recipe, pick a flavorful rather than bland seitan. Vegan Dad’s Veggie Lunch Meat or Everyday Dish’s Corned Beef would be good, and Bryanna’s Soy and Seitan “Ham” (about 2/3 of the way down the page) is a logical choice. Who cares if what you choose tastes like or is supposed to taste like pork though? Just pick something you like the taste of.

Here’s what I did:

8 cups vegan “chicken” broth
6 drops stevia or 2 tsp sugar
1-2 tsp liquid smoke
3 Tbsp vegan “bacon bits”
1 pound green beans, trimmed and either chopped or frenched (I frenched them because I’m fancy, and also I thought they’d cook faster that way…and because I have a nifty bean slicer that I like to give an occasional workout)
1 pound seitan, sliced somewhat thickly
1 pound potatoes, chopped (or not, if you use peewees like I did)
1 onion, sliced
salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste

Put the broth into a large pot or Dutch oven and begin heating. Meanwhile, fry the seitan slices in a bit of oil.

Drain on a paper towel and when cool enough to touch, rip up into bite-sized pieces.

Trim the green beans …

… and either french-cut them or chop them into 2″ pieces:

(my bean slicer is fun)

Add the bacon bits, liquid smoke, stevia or sugar, seitan, green beans, onions, salt, and pepper to the broth and bring to a boil.

Cover and reduce heat to medium low. Simmer for half an hour. Add the potatoes and continue to simmer for 20 minutes or until the potatoes are done.

To serve, remove solid pieces with a slotted spoon.

I think I probably could have gotten away with throwing everything including the potatoes into the pot and just cooking for half an hour, maybe 45 minutes if I had chopped instead of frenched the green beans. I don’t know why the green beans cook for four whole hours in the original recipe. I also could have doubled the green beans; they were my favorite part. (Mark’s favorite part was the seitan.) I have to say that I wasn’t expecting much from this recipe. I mostly did it just for kicks, because my mother said I probably couldn’t, and figuring that even if it was turned out really boring, we could just put hot sauce on it: everything is good with hot sauce on it. It turned out pretty well, though. Mark really liked it and ate two bowls-full, then drank the leftover liquid out of his bowl. It’s a great way to use up leftover seitan and I’d make it again. I might add baby carrots next time; I bet that would be a good addition.

By the way, I googled “what does pork taste like?” as a research attempt before starting this meal and learned that it apparently tastes like human. Um, gross?

At any rate, smoked seitan butt is very metal!