Guess what? I’m going to talk about FOOD! No cats, no raccoons, no sewing, no infrared pictures, just food, like in a real food blog! (Actually, I think cats are considered a normal part of food blogs.) How many of you figured it would take me a week or two to get around to the food I’ve been promising in my last two posts? In all fairness, I wasn’t planning to make a post tonight, but I got part-way through making dinner and thought, “this would be a good post; I’ll have to remember to do one next time I do this.” But then I thought, well, why not do it THIS time? It’s really more a suggestion than a recipe though.

See, I was all hyped up from the Sandor Katz class and making a couple kinds of sauerkraut. (It’s a good thing Sandor convinced me I don’t need to weigh my salt because my scale is on the fritz, which is terrible because even if I don’t need it for sauerkraut, I NEED it for bread. ACK!) I don’t know about you, but when I make sauerkraut, or really any time I use my mandoline, I end up with a bunch of little nubbies – the ends of vegetables I can’t slice on the mandoline without slicing my fingers along with them. Because I was making cabbage-based sauerkraut/pickles, I thought it would be smart to use those leftover pieces in wontons or dumplings, which I’d been planning to make this week anyway, because Mark moved a package of wonton wrappers from the freezer to the refrigerator.

My Sandor-inspired sauerkrauts:

I don’t have pictures of the first couple of steps because, like I said, I didn’t think to turn it into a post until a little into the process. But what I did was take a scant cup (because that’s what I had) of TVP and reconstituted it with an even more scant cup of boiling “beef” broth (I used Better Than Bouillon) by placing them together in a bowl and covering with a plate for a few minutes.

Next, I took the scraps I had from making sauerkraut: both green and red cabbage, some carrots, and daikon – about 2 cups worth – and put them into a food processor/chopper along with a few cloves of garlic and some roughly chopped ginger and processed until of a minced consistency. I ended up with somewhere between a cup and a cup and a half of minced vegetables. I also chopped a couple of scallions and assembled some shaoxing wine (sherry is a good sub), soy sauce, and toasted sesame oil:

I heated some oil in a cast iron skillet, then added the contents of the food chopper (i.e. the veggies) and cooked them down just a little, then added the TVP and cooked it all for another 3 or 5 minutes. I tossed the scallions into the mixture, then I sprinkled it with some of each of the soy sauce, shaoxing wine, and (less of the) sesame oil. Just a bit, you don’t want it to be soggy or even all that wet; you just want to add some flavor.

This is the exact moment I decided to start documenting – I didn’t even do my neurotic cleaning-as-I-go before I snapped the picture: look at that mess! I’m moving it from the skillet to a bowl so it cools down faster.

A close-up:

Next I found my trusty wonton press:

To fill the wontons or dumplings, a rounded tablespoon measure is perfect …

… or a small cookie dough scoop is perhaps even more perfect:

Put a round wonton wrapper (watch the labels; these aren’t always vegan) onto the press:

Plop the veggie/TVP mixture into the middle, …

… brush a little water on the edges of the wrapper, and squeeze the handles together. Look, it’s the Easter bunny!

Voila, a perfect wonton! Or dumpling. Or whatever you want to call it. Tasty stuff in a wrapper.

Keep on truckin’ until you’ve gone through all your filling. Don’t worry about making too many; these things freeze beautifully. I made about 3 dozen.

You have your choice of cooking methods from here. You can steam them, or boil them for a couple of minutes, or add to soup, or bake them, or steam/pan-fry them as I did. I followed Bryanna’s pan-fried dumpling method in Authentic Chinese Cuisine. I’ll show you pictures without writing out her entire instructions because Bryanna is extremely generous with her recipes and you should buy her books, and this one in particular is great. Basically you just fry on one side for a bit …

… then add some water and steam for a few minutes.

Make a dipping sauce of your choosing; I always just mix up some soy sauce, black or rice vinegar (they’re quite different so aren’t interchangeable, but both are nice in their own right), a few drops of toasted sesame oil, chili-garlic sauce, and some chopped scallions. I also served the chili green beans from Authentic Chinese Cuisine:

(Gomez is in this picture. Sigh.)

Don’t cook any leftover wontons you have. Instead, arrange them in a single layer without touching on a tray and put in the freezer until solid (this only takes 15-20 minutes, which is good because unless you have a gigantic freezer, you’ll have to do it in pretty small batches), then plop them all into a freezer bag. When you want to make them, just start to so as if they were freshly-made – no need to thaw. I’m excited to have stored some of these because with baby wildlife season coming up, I’m going to be having some late nights when I come home starving and these are going to get devoured.

Next, to show you how serious I am about staying on topic, tonight’s bonus picture is NOT of cats, NOT about travel, NOT of raccoons, NOT related to crafts, NOT taken with an infrared filter, and is FOOD! I don’t know why, but when I chopped this cabbage in half this evening, I was struck by its beauty. I can’t decide if the core reminds me of a woman dancing, Ganesh, or the tree of life, but I was moved by it nonetheless. Moved enough to spend 45 minutes with a tripod trying to get what I saw to show up in a photograph. Not sure I succeeded, but this is me demonstrating to you that in addition to all the other things I celebrate in life, I celebrate food.

No food, even though I swore there’d be some soon. And I swear I’m not going to turn this into a photography blog (though maybe I should start one if I can’t control myself), but I just wanted to advise anyone in Virginia to get out and enjoy the bluebells while you can. The best place is Bull Run Park, which is free for Fairfax County residents and $7 for non-residents. It’s probably worth the $7 when the bluebells are in bloom. The first (or last) bit of the 17.5-mile Bull Run Trail is located here, but there is also a 1.5-mile loop that was created specifically for enjoying the bluebells, called, you guessed it, the Bluebell Loop.

I like the Bluebell trail. It’s extremely easy, so it doesn’t really qualify as much of a workout, but when I’m carrying around two cameras, multiple lenses, and a tripod, I’m cool with “extremely easy”. Real cool. And I usually find wildlife, which of course is like striking gold to me. Here’s just some of the wildlife I’ve found there:

Ducks. I LOVE baby ducks! I got to meet a duck rehabber and I’ll tell you, raccoons are awesome, but baby ducks…soooo cute! (And a little easier than raccoons, methinks.)

Deer.

And I took one of Mark’s favorite pictures, the dragonfly:

Despite my affection for the park, and luck with wildlife, I’d never been there during bluebell season before this Saturday. I was missing out and I don’t want you to!

Bluebells as far as you can see.

I guess I never went during bluebell season before because I’ve heard it’s crowded and I don’t like crowds, but although there were times in which there were other people at the same place I was, there were more times when there was no one within sight or earshot.

Even when you do run into people, they are friendly but generally quiet. Most are there for the pictures or serenity as well.

At the risk of really looking more like a photography blog than a food blog, here are some infrared pictures as well, because I can’t resist. This is pretty much the same shot as the color one above it:

This tree is surrounded by bluebells, which of course aren’t blue through an infrared filter, but they are interesting anyway.

It’s a magical place!

There are several benches dispersed throughout the trail, each dedicated to a late bluebell-lover.

At the beginning/end, where it’s almost always muddy, there’s a boardwalk. It’s a REALLY easy trail.

If you’re in Northern Virginia, check it out. And if you’re not, but you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, check out whatever amazing foliage your particular neck of the woods has to offer, because it’s a beautiful spring!

That’s it – I’ve got groceries to unpack and sauerkraut to make, so I’m off to the kitchen, and next time there will be FOOD, glorious food, here on ieatfood.net.

Last week I randomly stopped by Sandor Katz’s website (author of Wild Fermentation and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved) and was shocked to find he had an upcoming event scheduled in DC. So I immediately ordered a ticket and last night after work, I headed to Chinatown…

… to the synagogue …

… and spent two and a half hours listening to him speak. Unfortunately, I didn’t lug my big camera with me and my phone is inexcusably terrible at taking pictures. But I tried to get some pictures because I knew I was going to want to tell you how great the talk was.

Sandor and a cabbage.

Sandor is a fountain of fermentation knowledge. He just rattles off the Latin names of various bacteria as if he’s reciting the alphabet and he’s very inspiring. I think even more than all the facts and scientific stuff he went over, my big take-away from the session was really just his attitude. I’m a very laid-back, relaxed cook and I don’t do a lot of measuring, but I have always calculated an amount of salt to use in my sauerkraut and other pickles based on the weight of the vegetables. Sandor, however, says you don’t have to bother with all that measuring nonsense. You just chop up some vegetables – however you want, or you know, don’t bother chopping them – and add as much salt as you feel like and put it in a jar, or some other vessel. Then when it tastes good, you eat it. And that’s that. To prove how simple a process this was, he made some sauerkraut while talking to us, without even thinking about it.

We also got some samples, including of a prior batch of his sauerkraut, so yes, I’ve tasted Sandor Katz’s sauerkraut and it was tasty! We also got kimchi, pickle juice, and beer.

If Sandor should make an appearance near you (and who knows, with a new book due out in a couple of weeks, maybe he will), I definitely recommend checking it out. Buy a ticket in advance too, because this event sold out and there was a line down the block to get in. Which I thought was pretty awesome. I didn’t realize until last night just how big a deal Sandor was. It was kind of interesting to be in a room with so many other people that share my interest in this stuff, even if I am terribly shy and of course didn’t talk to any of them. I often feel very isolated, but it turns out that whenever I venture out into the world in pursuit of one of my interests, whether it be wildlife or fermentation or whatever, there are plenty of other people around, even here in Northern Virginia, that are into it as well. Who knew? Anyway, the class was great and I can’t wait to get a bunch of jars of various things bubbling away…I’ve been lazy lately and this talk was exactly what I needed.

Once the class was over, I walked down 6th St NW towards the metro station …

… which is on the left corner of this picture.

Hopped on the Red Line at Gallery Place …

… and transferred to the Orange at Metro Center. I have a lot of bad things to say about DC, and even a lot of bad things to say about the Metro, but I DO have to say that the stations are nice and it’s very clean. That’s because they’ll arrest you for so much as finishing a candy bar on the escalator (no food allowed) or drinking anything, even if you’re handicapped! And if you are handicapped, you’ll need something to drink because you’ll be stuck underground forever because the elevators NEVER seem to be in service. I think they are a little overzealous in some of their policies, but it is probably the cleanest metro I’ve ever been on. It also has a particular smell that I forgot about until last night, and surprisingly, it’s not the smell of urine like the New York subway – I don’t even want to KNOW what they’d do to someone they caught urinating there – it’s not a bad smell at all. It’s just how the DC metro stations smell – I think it’s all that concrete or something – and you forget about it when you no longer have to ride it every day and then do so again after a long time. I had to wait a while for my train, which is why I have so many pondiferous thoughts about the metro’s odiferousness.

In addition to wondering why I’m talking about how the DC metro smells, you’re probably wondering why I’m being so fartsy-artsy with the black & white photos. Well, I mentioned a whole ago that I’d been taking some pictures with an infrared filter. I had a lot of fun with that, but it’s kind of a pain because of the very long exposures. The long exposures were part of the fun, but they aren’t very conducive to spontaneity, and I was thinking I wanted to get some fun IR pictures while we are in France and the Netherlands in May, and I might not always want to be carrying a tripod with me. Soooo, I found a camera that had been internally converted to take only IR pictures. With this modification, you can use the camera normally, so exposure times are normal, and you can see through the lens on the viewfinder, even auto-focus and all that good stuff. But every picture you take will be infrared-only, so this probably isn’t something you want to do to your only camera. But I found a used camera that already had the mod, AND the camera was one I was interested in anyway, a Panasonic Lumix GF2, which is a micro 4/3s camera, which means it’s really tiny but takes SLR-quality photos and leaves me with complete creative control, which is a must for me because I only use the manual settings.

All the pictures above except the colors ones of Sandor (which were taken with my phone) were taken with the new camera. None of them look very strange because they were taken in the city and things like buildings don’t reflect a ton of infrared light, especially at night. So those end up looking very normal once they’re converted to B&W. Things look a little different out in nature (or my yard) during the day. No, it didn’t snow (the weather’s been awesome and this is a particularly beautiful spring, I’ve found) – grass just reflects a lot of IR light.

We have a bunch of bamboo in our backyard. I keep maintaining it’s going to attract pandas, but so far we haven’t had a panda infestation that I know of.

I’m hoping to take some shots someplace other than my yard this weekend! None of these pictures were altered in any way other than being converted to B&W using Picasa, by the way. In fact, if anyone out there has any recommendations for a good RAW editor for Linux (I use Ubuntu) PLEASE let me know! I tried to get Lightroom and Photoshop working with wine, but it was a no-go. I don’t want to spend much time at all post-processing – I’m on a computer all day at work and I tend to keep away from it at home – but I am interested to see if I get better images working with the RAW files.

I try not to veer too much off topic on this blog (though somehow I’ve decided cats and raccoons are totally on topic), but at the risk of boring some of you, I might post a few. There’ll be more food next time, though, I promise! Quite likely fermented food!

Oh – one final thought. Any vegan tips for Nice, France? Mark has swapped out Marseille from our itinerary for Nice, which I’m cool with because Nice looks très belle, but I’m not as sure about eating there. Speaking of France, though, je lis les romans français! I read the English version of Julien Parme in about a day, and it kind of irked me in being SO like The Catcher in the Rye. It’s practically the same book 60 years later and in Paris. Putain. BUT the French version is perfect for my skill level and much more enjoyable. I bought a few other short, easy-seeming modern French books as well, but if anyone wants to suggest some more, I’m all ears. My reading skills are definitely way up, but my listening and speaking skills are pretty lousy. Story of my life – that’s true my English as well! But I’m hoping subtitles magically appear under everyone’s face when they speak in France. French subtitles are fine. My tutor said I’m out of luck with that. Putain.