It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and that’s mostly because my dear friend V is in town from San Francisco celebrating her birthday. I’ve simply been too busy hanging out with her and several of our friends to do anything creative in the kitchen or to update the ole blog. Many of our meals have been random events, however, Saturday night we hosted people here at the house – it was basically a big slumber party, minus the slumber – and I decided to serve individual pizzas. I made a huge batch of pizza dough, rolled out personal sized crusts, and let everyone add their own toppings. For some reason there are no pictures, but I did have leftover sauce and toppings, so for a low-key, detoxifying dinner tonight V suggested I toss some pasta in the leftover sauce. I did one better and dumped all the leftover toppings into skillet with the sauce and some pasta. I now have more than a square inch to spare in the refrigerator and dinner was surprisingly tasty. I didn’t take pictures during the preparation, and I don’t even have a real recipe, but since I took a picture of the resulting meal, here’s approximately what I did.

Pizza Pasta
Made with leftover pizza toppings. Serves 3.

8 oz whole wheat small shell pasta
1/4 red onion, diced
1/4 cup slivered vegan pepperoni
6-8 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/4 heirloom tomato, sliced thinly
1/2 orange bell pepper, chopped
3 Tbsp sun-dried tomato tapenade (or chopped sun-dried tomatoes)
1/4 cup sliced kalamata olives
2 Tbsp capers
1/2 cup caramelized onions
salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste
red chili flakes, to taste
3/4 cup pizza sauce, preferably home-made

Cook the pasta until al dente and drain. Toss with a small amount of olive oil to prevent sticking and set aside.

Heat some olive oil in a wok or large skillet. Add the diced onions and pepperoni and cook for two minutes, then add the bell pepper, tomatoes and garlic; cook for another three minutes. Add the tapenade and mix thoroughly. Add the capers and olives; cook for a minute or two. Add the caramelized onions, salt, pepper, and chili flakes; stir well. Add the pizza sauce and heat thoroughly. Toss with the pasta, garnish with fresh basil, and serve.

I rushed through the making of dinner tonight because my new laptop unexpectedly appeared on my doorstep this morning and I wanted to go play with it. Since I also wanted to make sure it recognized my camera, I snapped a few pictures before eating, but I can’t say this post is up to my usual standards of bombarding you with a million photographs. But doing things I often do on the laptop will tell me what all I settings I need to set and what I need to download and stuff, so here’s a boring post for you!

Cabbage and Seitan “Ham” Skillet Dinner

1 onion, sliced
1/4 pound seitan ham
1/2 jalapeno, chopped
1/2 head savoy cabbage, chopped
1 cup water
1 vegan “beef” bouillon cube
1/2 cup Dutch Apple Catsup
freshly ground salt and pepper, to taste

Heat some olive oil up in a large skillet. Add the onions and sauté for 5 minutes, until beginning to brown. Add the “ham” and jalapeno; sauté for another 5 minutes. Add the cabbage, water, bouillon cube and salt and pepper. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until cabbage is soft; about 15 minutes. Stir in the catsup.

That was my own recipe, thrown together with little thought. I also made a tossed salad. I enjoy making up my own salad dressings, but tonight I adapted a dressing I found in one of those “old time” cookbooks I borrowed from the library. Only this book claims to contain recipes from “historic” Alexandria, Virginia, but the only thing historic about it is the fact that all the contributors were female and all used their husbands’ names instead of their own first names. It seems to be from the 1970s or thereabouts. A time when a can of soup was considered something to base a recipe around. In fact, the recipe for this dressing does just that. It was called Tomato Salad Dressing and instead of the can of tomato soup it dictated, I used tomato sauce. I decided it tasted more like Bloody Mary Salad Dressing. I’d share the recipe with you, but I’ve decided I don’t think Bloody Marys should dress salads. The original recipe noted that the dressing was good on “cold cuts of beef”, so maybe it’d be better on some seitan. OR WITH VODKA.

Here’s my new laptop, which I got after arguing with Mark for about a year. But because it’s me and Mark it was a backwards argument: he arguing that I needed a new laptop and me insisting I didn’t. I finally gave in when it became impossible to boot my old one. By the time I got home from work today, Mark had removed that bloody awful Vista and installed the latest version of Ubuntu for me, and I have to say that after 8 years of using Linux on my personal computers, it is really nice to be able to plug stuff in and have it magically work. Like my camera. And (cross your fingers!) maybe my iPod! And I’d set aside the evening to download and install all the apps I’ll need, but the only thing I could think of that wasn’t already installed was Picasa. I just needed that and a picture of The Toonse for the desktop and I was set!

Wandering the library the other day, I for some reason decided it would be a hoot to look for really old recipes, particularly from this area, that I could veganize, so I trotted on over to the cookbooks. I expected to find just a couple of books, but my arms were full after looking over just a shelf and a half of about six shelves of cookbooks. I checked out books containing recipes from colonial Williamsburg, the Civil War, and our “founding fathers”.

Flipping through them a bit more intensively at home later, though, I started having second thoughts. I don’t know that I really want to veganize anything called “Sheep’s Head Stew,” which yes, really is what it sounds like. I couldn’t even read some of the recipes they were so disturbing. One of the books used the old-style “s” that looks like “f”, though, which made the chapter called “Flesh and Fish” look like “Flefh and Fifh”, which I kept reading as “Flesh and Filth,” which was sort of amusing…and accurately conveys how appetizing I found most of its contents.

I did eventually mark a few recipes, though. One of the more interesting was Dutch Apple Catsup. The modern intro says,

Just as catsup is very American, so is the idea of making it from apples instead of tomatoes.

Which I thought was funny given the name of the recipe is Dutch Apple Catsup. The recipe is in the chapter on New York recipes, though, where there were a lot of Dutch settlers – it was called New Amsterdam when this recipe was in favor – and in fact, most of the recipes in the chapter are Dutch this or that. I just thought it was linguistically humorous.

The intro also goes on to say,

This recipe looks strange, but if you prepare it, you will be surprised at what a great relish is it with roast pork, baked ham, and many other main course dishes.

The recipe is entirely vegan as written, though I have halved all the amounts (and still made more than I can probably use). I didn’t find it strange at all!

Dutch Apple Catsup
an old New Amsterdam recipe from the 18th century

6 large or 8 medium apples (or 1 pint prepared applesauce)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 medium white onion, diced
1 cup white vinegar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup prepared horseradish

Pare and core the apples …

… then quarter.

Place in a pot and cover with water.

Simmer without a lid until the apples are very soft and the water has almost completely evaporated.

Puree the apples. You can either push them through a sieve (the colonial method), run them through a food mill, beat them with a spoon, or put them in a blender. I did the least colonial thing:

At this point I realized I’d spent an hour and a half making apple sauce. You can easily skip all of the above steps and buy non-sweetened, all-natural apple sauce.

Place the remaining ingredients in a pot.

Stir in the apple sauce:

Simmer slowly for one hour.

As the recipe had said to serve with roast pork or baked ham, I figured I’d finalize my “ham” recipe. So here goes; it’s nearly identical to my last attempt.

Seitan Ham

2 1/3 cups vital wheat gluten (one box)
1/4 tsp white pepper
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp smoked paprika
1 cup beet juice (or just use water; the resulting “ham” simply won’t be pink)
1 cup ketchup

For the simmering broth
7 cups water
1 cup soy sauce
3 Tbsp liquid smoke
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp sage
1 onion, chopped
1/4 cup nutritional yeast

Bring the simmering broth ingredients to a boil in a large pot:

Meanwhile, mix the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl:

In a separate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients.

Pour the liquid into the dry and mix with your hands. Pardon me, but I forgot how to focus at this point. I’d have trashed the photo, but I wanted you to see the fuschia color.

Form into a log and place on a large piece of cheesecloth. I wash and reuse cheesecloth, which is why it looks dingy.

Roll up then tie of the ends like a Tootsie roll:

Place the seitan log in the simmering broth.

Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for an hour and 15 minutes (or pressure cook for 45 minutes).

Remove log from the broth.

When cool enough to handle, unwrap it. It’s much less pink, though the interior was pinkish when sliced.

It’s best if you bake it. Slice it up:

Baste it with something. The recipe I gave here is really tasty, but of course tonight I used the apple catsup, which was also tasty.

Bake at 400 degrees for half an hour.

Serve, with additional catsup.

Mark stole one of my slices off my plate, so it seemed to go over well with him. I have a ton of apple catsup left over. Now I’m wondering what else to do with it!