First of all: it’s my father’s birthday. So, Happy Birthday, Dad!!! If we lived closer, I’d have made you something nice to eat for your birthday!

Second of all: IT WON’T STOP RAINING. It’s relentless. And really annoying because we have a pool and I spend a lot of time and money on its upkeep SO I EXPECT TO BE ABLE TO SWIM. No such luck so far. We don’t have a heater, either, so I’m very sensitive to the ambient temperature. I’m not sure it made it above sixty degrees today. I get several alerts from NOAA about storms in our county every day. Yesterday afternoon I was warned simultaneously to expect: severe thunderstorms, hail the size of pennies, gusting wind, flash floods, AND tornadoes. When I told Mark of this he asked what they’d be warning me of next: a plague of locusts? I wouldn’t have been surprised. This has been the lousiest start to summer I’ve ever seen!

Flipping through the cookbooks I checked out of the library for dinner tonight, though, I found the perfect meal: Rainy Day Vegetable Cobbler, in Lost Recipes by Marion Cunningham. Guaranteed to cure my rainy day blues, it said. Since I have those blues big time, I made the cobbler. And I share with you. It was vegan as written other than the chicken stock and butter, neither of which I even read as non-vegan because they are so easy to sub for. I did, however, healthify it for you. The original called for what seemed to be a ton of butter.

When in the World is it Going to Stop Raining So I Can Finally Go Swimming Vegetable Cobbler

1 turnip, peeled and chopped
1 large or 3 small potatoes, chopped
1/2 head green cabbage, cored and chopped (the original called for celery root, which I didn’t have, so I subbed cabbage, which I did)
1 onion, chopped
3 carrots, chopped, or 1 cup baby carrots, cut in half
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
3 cups vegan ‘chicken’ broth
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 3/4 cups flour (I used 1 cup all-purpose plus 3/4 cup white whole wheat; original calls for all all-purpose)
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp vegan margarine
3/4 cup vegan cream (like MimicCreme)

I realize I’ve been a little heavy on the commercial fake meat lately, and I feel bad about that. It’s really not all I’m eating! I was going to do a huge, beautiful Ethiopian post yesterday, in fact, but my injera turned out bad. Real bad. So bad Mark and I got sushi for dinner instead. (All the wots and wot-not (har har) went in the freezer until I can get to the Ethiopian grocery this weekend and buy injera because I’m feeling gun shy about making it. I will try again at some point, however.) Last week I was just playing around with the fake meats I found in the Vietnamese grocery store. This week I’ve been looking at more “old time” recipes in cookbooks borrowed from the library. I usually keep a stash of vegan ground “beef” or “hot dogs” on hand for nights when I don’t have time to make a real meal, although often I find that they pass their expiration date before I get around to needing them. So tonight’s meal uses up some such packages. The recipe is an adaptation of one in Rare Bits, a cookbook that explores the “forgotten” origins of popular recipes. According to the book (which is really pretty interesting), the vendors at Coney Island didn’t like the association to dog meat the term “hot dog” brought to mind and refered to their weiners in rolls as “Coney Islands” or “Red Hots”. This is my vegan version of the recipe found in the book, scaled to make two “dogs”.

Coney Islands

1/3 cup vegan “ground beef”
1 small or 1/2 large onion, small dice
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/2 tsp chili powder
freshly ground black pepper and salt, to taste
3 Tbsp tomato sauce
2 Tbsp water
2 vegan “hot dogs”
2 vegan hot dog rolls

Set aside 3 tablespoons of the diced onions. Heat a small skillet over medium heat. Add a small amount of oil. When hot, add the rest of the onions and the garlic.

Cook until onion is soft.

Add the “ground beef” and cook for 2-3 minutes.

Add the tomato sauce, water, chili powder, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until thickened, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the hot dogs according to package instructions. I cook them on the George Foreman grill. Here they are probably overcooked.

Place a cooked hot dog in a bun.

Top with half the chili.

Top with half the reserved onions.

I served with a tossed salad (not shown) and Boston baked beans.

I cheated on the beans, which also make me feel bad. Instead of using dried beans, I used a can of small white beans. I didn’t measure, but I added 1/4 onion, a pinch of cloves, dry mustard, 2-3 tablespoons tomato sauce, some molasses and brown sugar, and salt and pepper, topped off with some water, and simmered for half an hour or so.

The Toonse helped me eat.

She loves books as much as I do, although her preference is more to rub her face on them than to read them.

I’ll warn you up front: this recipe will annoy most of the vegans among you. It’d annoy me a little bit if I came across it in a vegan blog. That’s because it calls for two ingredients most people probably can’t find. It may also annoy the non-vegans among you as well, because I’ve found that many non-vegans are annoyed by things that pretend to be meat. I’m going to post it anyway because I do sometimes find myself in possession of some realistic fake meat that I have no idea what to do with and it turned out really well. In fact, it turned out so well that I might try to replicate it with tofu – making it much more accessible – in the future. If you try it with something easier to find, like tofu, let me know the results!

Vegan Spicy Stewed Fish

8 oz vegan “fish” slices
1 lime
2 large cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1″ piece ginger, grated
1/4 cup vegan “fish” sauce (you can try 2 Tbsp soy sauce + 2 Tbsp water if you can’t find this)
1/4 large red onion, or 2-3 shallots, small dice
1 jalepeno
1/2 tsp coarse red salt
1/2 tsp coriander, ground or crushed
7 oz diced tomatoes (half a can)
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped

Here’s another frozen vegan “meat” I found in the Vietnamese grocery store after Mark and I went bowling: “codfish slices”. Like the cocktail weiners, they contain absolutely NO BORAX!

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Zest and juice the lime and add the results to a large, shallow dish along with the garlic, ginger, and “fish” sauce. Whisk.

Marinate the “fish” slices in this mixture for anywhere from 15 minutes to a couple of hours, turning occasionally.

Slice the jalepeno …

… and dice the onion or shallots in a small dice.

Chop the cilantro:

Heat a small skillet over medium heat with a little oil. Add the onion and saute a few minutes.

Add the jalepeno and continue sauteing …

… until both are soft.

Smear a thin layer of the tomatoes into a baking dish.

Add the “fish” slices, sprinkle with salt and coriander, and then evenly pour the marinade over the slices.

Add the sauted onions and jalepenos in a layer.

Add the rest of the tomatoes in a layer then sprinkle with the coriander and press the leaves down into the sauce so they don’t burn.

Bake for 20 to 30 minutes. While the “fish” was baking, I sauteed up some more of those French beans I made the other night, this time tossing with garlic, shallot salt, and half of the rest of the tomatoes.

I also made some couscous, using broth instead of water and stirring in the remaining quarter can of tomatoes as well as some more of the shallot salt, with which I seem to be pretty heavy-handed lately.

Remove “fish” from oven.

Serve!

This was really good! I asked Mark what he thought and he said, “I pretended it wasn’t fish and found that I really liked it!” (I don’t think that pretending it wasn’t fish required a large stretch of the imagination considering it wasn’t fish.) He also really liked the couscous and he ate more than a half a skillet of the beans, so for someone who claimed he wasn’t hungry, I’d say this meal turned out pretty well.

Here’s the whole meal:

I liked the texture of the “fish”, which I think will be hard to replicate without commercial products, but I do think tofu would adapt easily to this combination of flavors, so I think I’ll definitely try it again with tofu. Oooh, and I just realized that jackfruit would work really well here too! I think I’ll try that next now that I think of it!

Dinner preparations were a bit haphazard tonight as I got home late and encountered some issues that needed to be dealt with when I finally arrived. Likewise my photos are haphazard. Nonetheless, I worked out a theme for the meal and it turned out pretty awesome. The theme was French. That’s because yesterday I found some French beans at Wegmans and revolved the meal around them. What I did was basically throw things together and ask myself what flavors seemed French to me, which isn’t easy because I’m not well versed in French cuisine as it’s not known for being particularly vegan-friendly. I’d also bought a bag of lemons yesterday because, well, I love lemons. They’re on my list of Things About Which I Freak Out if I’m Not Well-Stocked With. Garlic’s number one and onions are a close number two, but I think lemons may be number three. Anyway, right now I have PLENTY of garlic, onions, and lemons, so I found myself wondering what sorts of things seemed French and lemony. And here’s what I came up with:

Lemon-Dijon Roasted Potatoes

2 lbs red potatoes, chopped into even but chunky pieces
2 Tbsp dijon mustard
1/4 cup lemon juice
zest of 1 lemon
2 Tbsp olive oil
4 cloves pressed garlic
1 tsp flaked sea salt, like Maldon
freshly ground pepper to taste
fresh herbs, to taste (I used rosemary and thyme)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wash and chop the potatoes. How large you chop them will determine how quickly they bake.

Place the mustard, oil, lemon juice, zest, salt, and pepper into a small bowl.

Whisk together.

Place the potatoes on a baking tray or dish on which they will fit in one layer. Pour the sauce over them.

Coat the potatoes with the sauce by tossing them around in your (clean!) hands. Place in the oven and cook for half and hour. Remove and add the fresh herbs:

Herbs from my indoor herb garden that I haven’t yet killed!

Return to oven and roast and additional 10 minutes or until done.

Serve:

Lemony Garlic French Beans

1/2 lb French beans, trimmed
3 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
zest of 1/2 lemon
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp shallot salt

Blanch the beans in salted, boiling water for 3 minutes.

Brush or spray a large skillet with olive oil. Add garlic and lemon zest, stir for 20 seconds. Add the beans and stir.

Pour 1/4 cup water into the skillet, as well as the lemon juice and shallot salt; stir to mix. Cover, reduce heat, and steam for 5 minutes.

Serve:

Basic Lentils

I know I was going for a vaguely French theme here and I do in fact have French lentils, but honestly, I love your plain ole, every day brown lentils more than any other and that’s what I’ve used here. I could eat them every day.

4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 cups dry green or brown lentils
4 cups vegan stock
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp shallot salt

In a heavy-bottomed pot, bring some oil (you need very little) up to temperature, then add the garlic and stir for 30 seconds. Add the lentils and stock; bring to a boil. Add the thyme and shallot salt, adjusting the amounts to suit your tastes. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 40 minutes.

To serve, dress the lentils generously with fresh-squeezed lemon (I used 1/2 a lemon on my portion alone).

To be enjoyed with red wine and followed with dark chocolate. Trés français! If only I’d managed to incorporate a grapefruit so I could throw around my favorite French word. (Though I’m also fond of bibliothèque.)

Now for an explanation of tonight’s post’s title. If you’ve read my about page, you’ll know that part of the reason for the name of this blog comes from Invader Zim. I don’t remember the episode, but in one of them, Zim shrieks, “sweet, lemony-fresh victory is mine!”, which is something I have taken to shouting when things go my way. Dinner tonight did go my way, and it was lemony fresh. I have no idea how French it actually was.

The weekend before last, Mark and I went bowling. Bowling isn’t something we ordinarily do, but we thought it’d be fun. I kicked Mark’s butt!

Mark claims it was because I was “trained” in bowling, but the fact of the matter is that although I did in fact take both Bowling and Billiards as my gym credits in college, I had to cheat to pass bowling class. I suck at bowling. Also, bowling class was at 8:30 a.m., which is simply outrageous. At least Billiards was at 4:30, when the bar was open and I could drink beer during class.

Anyway, we went bowling, and we didn’t take any skinheads. After bowling, we wandered into a nearby Vietnamese grocery store because I had never been there. I was surprised to find a lot of frozen vegan “meat” there, some of which I purchased just for the novelty of it. One of the items I found was vegan cocktail weiners:

What’s more, vegan cocktail weiners are entirely borax-free!!

I know it may seem extreme to some, but Mark and I are both committed to a borax-free diet. So into my shopping basket this rare find went!

Apparently what you are supposed to do with cocktail weiners is mix together a jar of grape jelly and a jar of barbecue or chili sauce and throw in the tiny weiners, then cook, generally in a crockpot. I can’t stand bottled barbecue sauces to begin with because they are too sweet, so I can’t even imagine to what levels of disgust grape jelly would elevate it. Therefore I made up my own weiner sauce. (Apparently cocktail weiners are also sometimes called “little smokies” and though that nomenclature has its appeal, I’m sticking to weiner.)

I bought a pineapple (it’s my favorite fruit!) for our weekend-long party, but never got around to serving it. Oops. So I incorporated it into tonight’s dinner as the “sweet” flavor. If you don’t have a pineapple lying around, try agave nectar or brown sugar to taste for the sweetness.

Vegan Cocktail Weiners in a Spicy-Sweet Weineralicious Sauce

1/3 cup chili sauce
2 Tbsp prepared yellow mustard
2 Tbsp vegan Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 slices pineapple (fresh, frozen, or canned), chopped finely
sriracha, to taste
8 oz vegan cocktail weiners (try cutting up regular-sized vegan hot dogs if you can’t find these, maybe adding a little liquid smoke to the sauce)

Defrost the weiners if necessary. I put them in a pot of hot water and put a weight on them to submerge them. Within 10 minutes they were defrosted.

If necessary, core and slice the pineapple. I set it in a bowl so I can collect any juice that escapes; I poured this juice into the sauce pot.

Chop the pineapple finely; you should have about 1/3 cup.

Mark’s been complaining for a few years that we never have “normal” mustard. By this he means French’s yellow mustard. I love mustard and prefer a high class product. I recently caved in and bought him some French’s as a treat. Cocktail weiner sauce seemed like something that would call for French’s. Use whatever mustard strikes your fancy, and add it with all the other ingredients except the weiners to a small pot.

To my surprise, the cocktail weiners were individually wrapped like tiny little sausages; I had to pop them each out of their casing.

Add the weiners to the sauce:

Simmer over medium-low heat until the weiners are warmed through and the sauce is thickened.

Serve!

Mark pronounced the cocktail weiners “strangely good”. I’d buy them again.

In other news, since I sometimes talk about books here despite the fact they are rarely considered food (except in Firmin, which, by the way, is a very cute book), I would like to announce that it is my opinion that Pride and Prejudice is improved greatly by the addition of zombies. Fortinbras brought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies down for me this weekend and I’ve been reading it along side the original, which I hadn’t read for many years. As far as I remember I was pretty ambivalent about P&P when I read it, which must have been in college because it has a price tag from my university on it. Reading the zombified version, however, I find myself constantly going back to the original to see if the non-zombie parts are really quite as ridiculous in the original and they are! The zombie version, which uses the original text for at least half of the wording, is actually much easier to read as they’ve tightened up the prose in order to fit the zombies in. Maybe it’s sacrilegious for an English major to prefer zombies to pure Pride, but it’s a lot more lively. Which is a funny assessment to make of the living dead, I guess.

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!

When I did my first cast iron post, my mom commented that she had an old cast iron skillet that she got from her mother and offered it to me. I was very excited about this because I didn’t know she had any cast iron (she didn’t use it much when I was growing up) and I love old stuff like that. I picked it up last weekend when we were there for Mother’s Day.

Although it was in great shape and probably at least 40 years old and I was very happy to have it, I was a little disappointed to find that it had no maker’s mark on the bottom. That’s not unusual and doesn’t reflect on the quality of the piece, but it meant it would be next to impossible for me to date it or really learn any more about it. Still, it had been my grandmother’s and that was pretty cool.

One thing that was curious, though, was the seasoning was completely gone from the cooking surface (but not the rest of it), yet there was no rust at all:

The lighting is a little warm, but that’s just the color of the iron; it’s definitely not at all rusty.

Because it seemed so unusual that it would not be seasoned yet not rusty, I asked my mother how she had taken care of it and whether she had purposely removed the seasoning or if it had just flaked off over time, and she responded that she “didn’t know nothing about no seasoning” and had never done anything with it, either giving it special care or purposefully removing the seasoning. She just used Crisco or oil to cook in it, though she didn’t use it much. So really it’s pretty amazing it was in this condition.

The inside was beautiful, but the underside was less pretty; the old seasoning was intact and sort of messy:

Something made me stare at the bottom of it when we got home Sunday night, though. For some reason, I thought possibly I could make out lettering in the gunked-up seasoning on the bottom. But I kept telling myself my eyes were playing tricks on me.

This is where I thought I saw letters, right above the rust.

I wanted to see letters real bad, and I looked at the bottom of that skillet harder than I’ve ever looked at anything in my life (except maybe that one old photograph of Broadway in New York – Mom will know what I’m talking about!). I shoved the skillet in Mark’s face and asked him if he saw letters. To my surprise, he said he did! He did a rubbing for me, which did seem to show something was there, but we couldn’t make it out much better than we could looking at the skillet itself. I stared and stared and stared at that skillet.

I didn’t photograph the skillet that night, but here’s a photo from later, which I have lightened a bit; you can see better where I was seeing the phantom letters:

It came to me abruptly. I was staring as hard as I possibly could at that skillet when suddenly I knew it said WAPAK. It was weird, really. I didn’t know what WAPAK meant, but Google quickly informed me…it was a cast iron company! Honestly, I thought I was going to be googling 5-letter words that looked like – – PA – all night long, because I was still sure my eyes were tricking me and those were the only two letters I was nearly certain about. It was very hard to see it. What’s even more exciting, though, I learned the Wapak company was only in business from 1903 to 1926. This skillet couldn’t have been new to my grandmother – and is definitely older than my beloved Griswold. I don’t know for sure (and my grandmother didn’t confirm or deny when I asked her), but I am pretty sure my grandmother got it from her mother-in-law, my great-grandmother, knowing what I do about my family history. My mom agrees with me. So I suddenly have my great-grandmother’s skillet!

I cleaned it up last night. I took sand paper to the bottom of it. And lo…

There was such a build-up of seasoning on the bottom of the skillet that when I was trying to date it, before I had my revelation, I thought it didn’t have a heat ring. It turns out it does: the seasoning was hiding it.

I got off all the seasoning I was will to exert the energy on with sand paper and took it inside to clean up with steel wool before seasoning.

Then I seasoned it four times. Here it is subsequently looking extremely shiny. There’s no oil in it.

And it’s like a dream! Oh my gosh, it is soooo nice! I was afraid when I got it that I wouldn’t love it as much as my Griswold and I’d feel bad liking the non-family-heirloom skillet better. But it is BETTER! It truly is as smooth as glass and the very first thing I cooked in it was sliding around ridiculously! These Brussels sprouts were chasing each other around like race cars before I completely packed them in!

Because Mark can eat much more than half a skillet of Brussels sprouts, I made two skillets-full of them and had a cook-off between the Griswold and the Wapak:

I don’t know what my life has come to that I spend my Saturday nights pitting two 80-year old skillets against each other in weird Brussels sprouts contests.

Instantly this skillet has become the one thing in my kitchen I will never part with.

Oh, and speaking of cast iron. After mentioning that my parents got a glass top electric stove when they remodeled their kitchen, because they can’t get gas and apparently it’s hard to find non-glass top electric stoves these days, I did some research on ranges. Since we are renting and I can’t very well build the kitchen of my dreams in a rental home, I’ve never looked into them much. It seems glass tops really are prevalent, which is horribly annoying since there is no way in hell I’d ever buy one. I learned about something called induction ranges, though. Apparently they are even better than gas. They cook using a magnetic field. They are instantly responsive to changes in the heat setting and they have a high output. They are also safer than both gas and regular electric stoves. I’m very interested. One of the major disadvantages is you must cook in ferrous (magnetic) cookware. Guess what is extremely ferrous? Cast iron. In fact, cast iron is just about the only thing you can cook in. Which is a-okay with me! I’d miss my Calphalon pots, but if it comes down to me ever having to choose between glass top – giving up my cast iron – and induction – giving up my Calphalon, trust me, great-grandmother’s skillet ain’t going nowhere. And my wok is cast iron, which means basically I’m all set.

Too bad induction ranges cost $3,000 or I’d go break my electric coil stove and make the landlord buy me one! Seriously, though, does anyone have any experience with these?

I have a nice tale for you. About this time of year, I start reading a lot about ramps on many the food blogs. Ramps are leeks that grow wild in the American Northeast, down at least as far as Virginia, yet I’ve never had them. I’ve never even seen them in person. But as they are touted as tasting like a mild cross between onion and garlic, both of which I adore, and as I live in Virginia, where they are native, I’ve always wanted to find and consume ramps. I knew my best bet was the farmer’s market, and I love farmer’s markets, I really, truly do but they all occur at some ungodly hour of the morning on weekends. Some of them actually close before what I deem an acceptable waking hour. I may, after weeks of feeling guilty, manage to drag myself out of bed early enough to hit up the farmer’s market mid-summer, but ramp season is very early and very short and ends before I’ve reached that point. This year more than any other, though, I’ve been wanting to try ramps.

So I did some research yesterday and learned there are FOUR farmer’s markets in my immediate area on four different days of the week. If I can’t make it to at least one of them, there’s simply something wrong with me. Furthermore, one of them takes place on Wednesday mornings directly on one of the two possible routes I can take to work. Wednesday – today – was the very next day. I had no excuse. Not only that but this morning the clouds parted and the rain relented and that glowing, glorious orb I think we used to call the sun shone down upon Northern Virginia, greeting us with its warm embrace after 40 days and nights of our soggy misery. I put the top down on my convertible and drove merrily off to the market.

There were only a few stalls today’s market, probably because it is so early in the season. I did, though, manage to snag some utterly gorgeous strawberries, and some fabulous asparagus, and some nice lettuce, and some plump tomatoes. I even got some lovely spring onions. What I did not get were ramps. There was a distinct lack of ramps at this market. Foiled! Nonetheless, I was pleased with my purchases and motored on into work in the bright sunshine.

After work, I had to go to the grocery store, for I had a shopping list a mile long. I puttered around the produce department at Wegmans, picking up items for my latest project (you’ll be hearing more about this shortly), when what to my wondering eyes should appear but ramps!!! At the grocery store!! My grocery store!! It’s difficult for me to put into words how much I love Wegmans. Anyway, I gathered as many ramps as I could stuff into a bag and finished my shopping with a beatific smile that didn’t leave my face even when it took three cashiers 20 minutes to find the code for ramps so I could be greatly over-charged for something that grows wild upon our land.

Returning home, I started some brown rice cooking in the rice cooker and contemplated what the heck to do with these elusive ramps. After a bit of googling, I realized most vegetarian ramp dishes involve either pasta, which I didn’t want for dinner and anyway I’d already started cooking rice, or potatoes, and for some reason none of the 80 pounds of produce I purchased today included potatoes. Then I found this recipe for ramp gratin, which I adapted for vegan tastes and served with that lovely asparagus and the aforementioned rice. And I share with you!

Ramp Gratin

1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
10-12 oz ramps
2 slices bread (I used one large chunk of homemade sourdough French bread)
1/4 cup Dragonfly’s Bulk, Dry Uncheese Mix, or your favorite vegan cheese
zest and juice of one lemon
1/2 cup vegan sour cream
6 Tbsp water
freshly ground salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tear the bread into chunks then put in a food processor or blender and pulse until it’s in crumbs.

Place the bread crumbs in a dry skillet over medium heat and toast, stirring or tossing frequently, for about 3 minutes or until beginning to brown.

Wash the ramps.

Trim the bottoms off.

Chop them up, both the onion-y bulb and the green tops.

Zest the lemon, then juice.

Heat the skillet over medium heat, add some olive oil, then the garlic.

After a minute, add the ramps.

Sauté until the ramp greens are wilted.

Stir in the bread crumbs, uncheese, and lemon zest.

Add the sour cream and water.

Add the salt and pepper and let it thicken for a few seconds.

Move the skillet to the oven and bake for about 5 minutes.

For the asparagus, I mixed together about a tablespoon of olive oil, some of the lemon zest (before I added it to the ramps), 2 pressed cloves of garlic, some salt, and one or two tablespoons lemon juice.

Then I rubbed my hands in the mixture, then rubbed each stalk of asparagus with the vinaigrette before placing on the George Foreman grill.

Serve with a grain.

So, were ramps worth the wait? I’d say so. Let’s put it this way: if you like onions, you’ll like ramps. I’m looking forward to trying them in other variations.

In other news, Mark and I visited the parental homestead on Sunday, both for Mother’s Day and to see my parent’s brand-spanking-new renovated kitchen, which I found very exciting. I was the first person to cook in the kitchen! Neither of my parents enjoy cooking, so it was fitting that someone who does was on hand to inaugurate it. My mom requested I make spaghetti, which I think is sort of an amateur dish, but a safe one (my parents aren’t very adventurous eaters) and because it’s so easy, one that allowed me to relax and just have fun in the new kitchen. I put Mark in charge of photography, which was a bit of a mistake because he takes extremely unflattering pictures of me. And we somehow managed to not take any that really show off the beautiful new kitchen, but never fear, my aunt and I plan to do a post from the new kitchen soon so you can see it then.

As Mom is still in the process of unpacking all the items she’d packed away before the old kitchen was torn out, we spent a lot of time looking for stuff, like this:

Behind Mum’s head you can see the large built-in bread box, which I envy so badly. But she’s not even using it for bread! It’s stuffed with tea supplies!

Here I am looking for more stuff. All the lower cabinets have pull-out drawers, which is handy.

To my surprise, I found a cast iron bacon press!

“Hey, can I have this?!” I asked, having recently put a grill press on my wish list.

“No!” Mum retorted, “You don’t eat bacon!” But she doesn’t use it for bacon either!

I had brought with two bags of foodstuffs, which I spread out on the island. “What is all of this…what do you call this stuff?” my father asked. “Um, ingredients?” I said. “Yes, that’s the word: ingredients. I’ve never seen so many ingredients before.” “What do you people eat?!” I exclaimed. I still don’t know, but apparently it doesn’t involve ingredients.

I also brought my own knife, as well as several other utensils. My mother did have much better knives than Smucky did, but I learned my lesson in Australia and I now travel with my trusty chef’s knife.

While I prepared dinner, Mom continued to unpack stuff and Dad stood around holding dogs. The white blob in this picture is one such dog.

Although I LOVED my parents’ new kitchen, the one thing I didn’t love was the stove, which is a glass-top electric stove. I don’t like electric stoves to begin with, but I really dislike glass tops because they seem very fragile. I’m sure I would break the glass in about a day, and I don’t know that cast iron is good for them. Not only that, but a little bit of water boiled over when I was cooking the pasta and when the stove top cooled down, we realized it wasn’t coming off. WATER wasn’t coming off the stove top. Mom tried to wipe it off and it wasn’t budging. Dad said they’d have to use the special cleaner. What? Special cleaner to get WATER off? The only reason they got a glass top stove was because they said nearly all models of electric stoves sold today are glass top; it’s hard to find non-glass top electric stoves. So of course I’m convinced this is all a marketing ploy. The manufacturers are only selling glass top stoves because it costs so much money to replace the glass and it’s a GIVEN you’re going to break the glass. Not to mention the ridiculous cleaning products you’re supposed to buy. Lame, lame, lame. I guess I’d better be careful not to break my electric stove if the only thing the landlord will be able to replace it with is a glass top! I rather doubt he’s going to follow up on my request to have a gas line laid so I can go back to having a gas stove, which I much prefer.

How Mark got himself kicked out of the kitchen:

And here’s Sophie being incredibly cute. She doesn’t seem to care one way or the other about the new kitchen.

Finally, how awesome is my new logo?! My friend Travis made it for me! Coming soon: my mom gives me an awesome and timely family heirloom, and I cook Colonial.