Malawry

Hi JAZ, One thing I was hoping you'd cover more in your presentation was some discussion of classic mixers. It looks like you don't use that many mixers in your drinks, regarding drinks containing them as mixed drinks and not really cocktails. Is this true for you? Do you consume and/or make any mixers, and what do you think of them? I am personally a devotee of sours, and was hoping to pick up some tips on making a truly flavorful sour mix.

Hi Beans, thanks for your comprehensive presentation. I am curious, at your own job: how many of these funky garnishes do you actually keep on hand? If you were advising somebody on setting up a professional bar, what do you think they should stock? (I'm referring here to the nontraditional bar garnish components you discuss: violet sugar, the edible flowers, the wowie-zowie pretty things in the pix you included in your presentation.)

While I was fortunate enough to host the first officially sanctioned blog on eG, I don't think I ever documented what I ate on a day to day basis. Now that I've said this I feel the need to bare my soul on one topic. I almost always picked up two Krispy Kreme donuts when I went by the supermarket to buy the WashPost and NY Times before school on Wednesday mornings. I'd eat one of them as I drove to the beltway; I'd polish the second off while perusing the food section headlines from the school parking lot. Healthy! I think NeroW deserves the real credit for this one, with her bio thread. She has to eat way more nasty-ass crap at school than I ever did. (Baking powder and cream of tartar, anyone? Makes caul fat sound appetizing!)

Great point, and one I forgot when working on my presentation. Thank you!

If you have a couple of flats coming and you're not throwing a big party where you can feed people these blackberries, I recommend you make blackberry jam. I picked a couple flats' worth of blackberries a few weeks ago and made a wonderful jam from them, which will allow me to enjoy blackberries even in the dead of winter. It wasn't hard, either.

Hey, maybe they read my vegetarian cooking lesson and got inspired! ...right?

E. and I had dinner at Palena tonight. We each decided to get the four-course menu (Palena only does prix fixe, three four or five courses). We were seated at a table that I thought was surprisingly small for a restaurant that charges what Palena charges. There was a table almost exactly the same size right next to us that was set for three! I appreciated that I didn't bump against any other tables while walking to ours, but would have liked a little more space for our plates. I selected the antipasto palanese as my starter, john dory as my entree, and the cheese course as my first three courses. E. chose pancotto col pomodoro, potato gnocchi, and then the john dory for his first three. Room temperature bread arrived, a rustic white Italian crusty bread and a similar whole wheat specimen, with (YES!) room temperature, rich butter. We snacked away and I sipped on a campari. The antipasto and the pancotto arrived shortly. The antipasto had a large cloudlike ball of buffalo mozzarella at its center, surrounded by fresh springlike leaves of spinach. Three tiny heirloom carrots were tucked to the left. Three balsamic-glazed beets: red, pale yellow and one that looked surprisingly like proscuitto in color, were arranged on the plate. And a single cippolini onion graced the plate. Several shaved rounds of housemade fennel salami completed the plate. The salami was not as licorice-y as I'd expected; the fennel flavor was a nice background to the fat/salt/meat flavors and was cut with black peppercorns. The beets were perfect in their soft texture and earthy flavor. E. had a hard time keeping his mitts off my salty mozzarella. The pancotto, a bread and tomato soup, tasted of August tomatoes and was gently warm and comforting. It came topped with a poached egg. E.'s gnocchi were absolutely perfect in every manner. It's so difficult to make gnocchi that aren't leaden, or waterlogged, or gummy. They came topped with a pesto-type sauce and sprinkled with red tomato brunoise. The John Dory was crisply seared on top, set on a small puddle of oregano and olive oil. Pieces of chard leaves, dark and mineral-y, were scattered across the bowl, and there were several Manila clams gracing the dish. The clams were saline, tender, what I always hope I'll taste when I sample a clam. There were a few pieces of fingerling potato, which seemed a bit undercooked for my tastes. They were a little too chewy. For the cheese course, we were served plenty of cheese to satisfy us both. A wine-rubbed pecorino, a chunk of bra cheese, a very goaty goat cheese, a piece of truffle-infused soft cow's milk cheese, and an assertive roquefort were placed on a small dish between us. Four slices of Tyrolean almond bread, packed with dried fruit, accompanied the cheeses. The bra cheese was a special favorite for both of us, creamy and unctuous. E. was fond of the pecorino, a cheese that I was familiar with because it was on the menu at Ortanique and I'd cut it for cheese platters as part of my job there. For dessert, I chose the cashew dacquoise while E. selected the chocolate-coconut cake. The dacquoise was shaped into two rounds with a rich cashew filling in between. A quenelle of bitter chocolate sorbet rested atop kumquat confit to the side. The dacquoise was extremely sweet, the sorbet extremely bitter, and the confit extremely acidic. I love flavors that take me to the edge of what I can accept, but these flavors were almost too much for me to take. E.'s cake was a rich, layered concoction with a coconut frosting. A quenelle of coconut sorbet to the side was topped with a small, dense rectangle of chocolate torte. I thought the sorbet was the best part of his plate; it was light and fresh tasting, while the cake seemed a little heavy. A cookie plate was also brought to us with our desserts: an amusing animal cracker (with pink frosting!), a chocolate chip cookie, a caramel, a diamante, and various macarons, almond cookies and French-style butter cookies were included in the plate. The cracker won major points for being both amusing and crisp-light. Ann Amernick's caramels are rightly renowned, buttery-rich and the right balance of sweet and bitter. We also liked the chocolate chip cookie, which was chunky and had a soft interior that melted against the crisp exterior. I thought a lot of the other cookies were too sweet and not easily differentiated. How many almond and butter cookies does one cookie plate require? More fruit, chocolate, nut flavors would have been a welcome addition to the assortment. Would I go back? Absolutely. I was impressed with how fresh and perfect many of the ingredients were. And the chef clearly knows how to treat such good ingredients with respect. This was one of the better meals I've had in Washington.

Rachel, as you may have guessed, you have caught an error. It is not dates that are fertilized by wasps, it's figs. Check this site for more information. Specifically, Also, in your recipe, if you have the ability to smoke foods I think pre-frozen smoked tofu might make a nice substitute for the meat in that paella recipe. You can buy smoked tofu at natural foods markets.

Maryolive, welcome to eGullet and thanks for your post. Keeping things separated is indeed important, especially if you are going to cook for a vegetarian more than once. At my house, we have a little portable gas grill that is known in our circle as the "veggie grill." We never grill meat or fowl on it, and it's small enough that we can take it to any cookout. Friends who don't eat meat know they can have a "clean" surface for grilling their goodies, and this little guy is often borrowed by other friends when camping or hosting their own cookouts. My home pots, pans, cutting boards and so on are all vegetarian-plus-fish, no meat or fowl goes on them. I scrub everything down if we have our vegan friends over. Not all people expect this level of separation. I didn't, especially in the later years when I was a vegetarian. It goes back to the question of "where do you draw the line?" Still, cleaning your surfaces and using separate utensils is probably the right thing to do when cooking for a vegetarian.

I tried it once. It was pretty good. We bought the chicken-like nuggets (which are not breaded) and tossed them into an Indian-style curry for dinner one night. They really did taste chickeny (and this was after I started eating chicken again). I haven't bought them since though; they're expensive. Tofu and tempeh are totally different in texture and flavor from this stuff. Seitan probably comes the closest. Do a quick search and you will find a couple of discussion threads on Quorn here on eGullet.

I got a second batch of ruggies going yesterday. I used many of the suggestions sent here and via my email, especially WRT keeping the dough cold all steps of the way. The results definitely look and even taste better, and I'll be making a couple more batches so I can take some to the cousin's bat mitzvah. Thanks for all the tips, guys!

A fair perspective, although it's one I disagree with. With that, let's leave the subject of labeling and the politics therein behind. After all, this is a discussion about cooking vegetarian food. While vegetarianism is an inherently political choice for many, it's ultimately all about the food no matter whether or not you eliminate animal products from your diet.

Next time you visit a big city, ask if there are any vegetarian Chinese restaurants around. DC has a few, as does NYC. What those guys do with seitan will blow your mind. Thought your fakin' pork sounds pretty mind-blowing too! Wow. How long did it take you to make that?

Nope, I didn't cover tempeh. I guess I didn't want to overwhelm with information, but now I wonder if I didn't provide enough! Tempeh is a fermented soy food and has a pleasingly chewy/chunky texture. It's great in sandwiches. I think it holds up well to strong flavors, and it keeps its shape if handled carefully when cooked. Tempeh never became a huge part of my own cooking repertoire because it's much more expensive than tofu, and I like tofu better. I think tempeh is one of the easier vegetarian proteins to get to like, though. Click here to go to my culinary school diary. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere you can't get to it, it's just archived in "The Fridge," where old special features go when they are no longer active. Thanks for asking about it!

TVP is a soy food, basically little granules of chewy soy protein. I've found little use for it, although some people like to add it to stews and to vegetarian chili. I've barely worked with it myself but I believe you prepare it by soaking it to reconstitute and then adding it to a dish for brief cooking before serving. When you reconstitute it you may wish to use a flavored liquid like vegetable stock, or maybe coconut milk or something depending on what you're adding it to. TVP is one of the common ingredients in manufactured fake-meat products, btw. Looks like the conference Katherine linked to was designed for people who work on the technology end of turning TVP into something you might actually buy (if you buy fake meat that is!). When it's cooked it turns into little chewy granules, which are somewhat like ground beef in texture.

Katherine, I am glad you mentioned seitan. Seitan is a wheat-gluten protein alternative, and it has a delightfully chewy texture...not spongy-ish like frozen or fried tofu. It's used at many Asian vegetarian restaurants as a meat substitute. I have very little experience working with it, which is mostly why I didn't cover it in my lesson. What do you like to do with it? And what's your technique for making it? Also, thanks for the TVP link. Wow is right!

Some do. In my experience, this applies to newer, younger vegetarians more than other vegetarians. (I dunno, maybe I'm just saying that because I was this way when I was 18 and first became a vegetarian...) I haven't encountered anybody who feels this way in a long time. I have found plenty of vegetarians who eschew fake meat, but it's been more a matter of personal preference than a political objection.

Hi Wren, thanks for your comments and welcome to eGullet. I used to agree with you about terminology. I felt that people who ate fish were eating animal flesh and shouldn't use the "vegetarian" term. I felt that it simply confused everybody else as to what consisted of a vegetarian. But now I see the utility of the term pesco-vegetarian. It's simpler than saying "I don't eat meat or fowl, but I do eat fish, dairy and egg foods." My partner is a pesco-vegetarian, and he sometimes uses the word "vegetarian" without the prefix to describe himself. It makes sense when so many fish preparations in restaurants use bacon, proscuitto, chicken stock and other meat or fowl foods. At least this way he won't be served those other foods, and he has no problem with eating vegetarian without fish if it simplifies things. Besides, I'm a big believer in letting people label themselves. It doesn't really hurt anything, and if you go about questioning peoples' labels it's a slippery slope leading to all sorts of hairy issues. See my above examples of vegetarians who eat fish sauce, gelatin, etc. Does anybody really want to have their every motive questioned? I accept peoples' food labels at face value, and generally only question them in the context of figuring out what I can cook for them. It's the only safe bet.

We've discussed the phenomenon of the vegetarian factor influencing where a group of people eats in threads addressing the BK Veggie sandwich. My own experience in restaurant kitchens (which is quite limited) is that many chefs have a hard time coming up with something that suits their restaurant's style that will satisfy vegetarians. This is especially true in more suburban areas, again in my personal experience. Still, vegetarians are easy to cook for. I watched the gyrations the kitchen went through while I worked on my externship when people with more extreme dietary restrictions showed up. They'd usually get plain steamed salmon with plain steamed vegetables, but then they weren't usually vegetarians on top of their other restrictions! I remember one of my coworkers consulting me while assembling a plain steamed vegetable platter for one vegetarian. I tried to advise him on how to make the meal look appetizing, arranging a rainbow of veggies in a big pretty bowl so they'd feel they got their money's worth out of such simple food. Frankly I wanted a big veggie bowl for myself by the time we were done! I agree that lots of omnivores delight in vegetarian food. I'm one of them! Many of the omnivores I know are partnered with and/or related to vegetarians and eat vegetarian most of the time.

Fresco, you've touched on something really important here. Vegetarians are vegetarians for dozens of reasons, and many of these reasons have nothing to do with a distaste for meat. The first few years I was a vegetarian I avoided all fake meat, believing that such foods sounded gross (franken-food-like?). I was unappealed by their aromas and textures, and I didn't really miss meat and fowl. Later I started to miss those other foods more, and I experimented with lots of fake meats. I've tried most of those on the market at this point. There seem to be two approaches to flavoring these products: 1. Make it taste as much like real meat as possible and 2. Don't even pretend it's meaty. Boca burgers fall into the former category, while the original Gardenburger is squarely in the latter. These two approaches appeal to different types of vegetarians, namely those who miss meat and those who just want something to eat on a bun with mustard at their friend's cookout so they can feel like they fit in. Vegetarians for religious reasons are probably the most likely targets of these foods. I live in an area populated with many Seventh-Day Adventists, not too far from a big Orthodox Jewish community, and there are plenty of Buddhist Indians in my burb as well. Therefore there are large selections of these foods at both the mainstream markets as well as the natural foods co-op where I belong, the Adventist Health and Book Store, and and Whole Foods Market in my area. Within 3 miles of my home I can buy pizza topped with vegetarian sausage, a tofu hot dog, gardenburgers galore, or a tofu club sandwich with vegetarian bacon. My brother, who is Orthodox Jewish and keeps Kosher, eats cheeseburgers with real beef and vegan "pepperjack cheese" with a soy milkshake sometimes. I see plenty of non-religious vegetarians chowing down on these treats and raiding the Morningstar Farms green boxes at the supermarket, too. I have always been unabashed about my vegetarianism, but I ate them sometimes when I was a veg, and I enjoyed them for what they were. I still eat them sometimes. What difference does it make? I've always viewed vegetarianism as an issue where each individual gets to decide where they draw the line. I know vegetarians who don't ask if they used fish sauce in that "vegetarian" pad thai, vegetarians who eat gelatin, vegans who snitch pieces of egg-enriched cookie dough when they think nobody is looking. In light of these boundaries and their regular crossing, meat substitutes seem to me like less of a gray area. By the way, I intentionally did not cover cooking with meat substitutes in my lesson. I don't like to approach vegetarian cuisine as a way of figuring out what you can swap out for meat. And fake meat is an electric issue both among vegetarians and among foodies (see Nina Planck's The Daily Gullet piece on soy foods as one example). I figured it was best to avoid it, and teach how to cook with less-altered vegetarian foods. But I'm glad you asked about it; it's an interesting subject, one with no clear answers.

Fat Guy, I'm sorry to say I'm ill-equipped to describe the differences between the startling array of tofus sold at Asian markets. I know that silken tofu is very wet and soft, and is easily pureed for use in sauces or smoothies. Silken tofu is available in firm or soft versions, and the firm freezes pretty well. Chinese-style tofus tend to be coarser in texture, and they have a better texture (if you like chewy tofu, which I do) both before and after freezing. And then there's the aseptically packaged sort of tofu, which in my experience is decent for pureeing or for eating raw with soy sauce and chili oil but which does not freeze very well. Most of the aseptically packaged tofu I've seen is Japanese. I neglected to mention in my lesson that fresh tofu (the sort that's sold in the refrigerator case), if not frozen immediately, needs to have its water changed daily. After a couple of days in the same water, tofu tends to get a little funky. Also, when you squeeze it dry, if you dig in with your fingers it will fall apart whether you froze it or not. I usually flatten my hands and place them on opposite sides of the brick or slice of tofu and squeeze by pushing my hands together. I am also sorry to report no experience with a pressure cooker. I almost bought one this summer but ended up deciding not to (they're much more expensive than I thought they would be!). Mark Bittman suggests that you can use a pressure cooker for unsoaked beans; combine 1 part dried, rinsed, picked-over beans with four parts water and cook for 15 to 30 minutes under high pressure. Add a little oil to prevent the skins from clogging the gauge. Deborah Madison suggests two techniques, both intended for bean soups where the texture of the finished bean is less important. One has you cook unsoaked beans with oil and aromats and then add soup vegetables when the beans are done, the other has you start the vegetables in oil and then add unsoaked beans and liquid and cook the whole soup in the pressure cooker. If you try these techniques, let me know how they work for you.

So sorry Monica and friends, I have an engagement that night. If you end up rescheduling count me in, but otherwise have fun!

I've made a second batch of dough. It's chilling in the fridge right now. I repeated the ingredients from the Joan Nathan recipe, but I used a mixer this time. I think the dough has a better texture, plus it stayed nice and cold. We'll see how it turns out. Thanks for all the tips, everybody. Edit: Just to clarify, I only own Joan Nathan's book. I don't own any Heatter books.

You might say my first experience with professional-scale baking was gearing up for my own bat mitzvah. In Greensboro, NC, where I grew up, our synagogue was kosher and if you wanted to serve food at the synagogue you had to make it in their professional kitchen kitchen. Most Hebrew school classes were 10-15 kids thick at the time, and when bar/bat mitzvahs rolled around all the moms for the kids in that class would help bake for the onegs for each of these events. One or two days of 10-15 women in a big kosher kitchen was enough to crank out plenty of petit fours for one kid's oneg on Friday night after services, with plenty leftover to put out on Saturday morning for a kiddush luncheon. When my bat mitzvah rolled around, I insisted on helping the ladies with all the baked goods. I already loved being in the kitchen and was comfortable with the professional-grade equipment. I even got some of my girlfriends to come with me. We had a blast, making cookies and dipping them in chocolate and rolling them in nuts. Mom told me later that a lot of the other moms were nervous about having me there, thinking I'd just make a mess and not really do much...and then they were impressed with my dedication once it became clear I was serious. Shelby, NC has such a small Jewish community that there will be no big Friday night oneg after services. Almost all the events for this bat mitzvah are on Saturday: AM services, a lunch at the hospitality room (which I'm providing desserts for), havdalah service and then a country-club party with swimming. My cousin is serious about swimming, as is her father, and she wanted to be sure lots of swimming happened at any party in her name. Cool kid. There's no need for anything I make to be pareve, and incidentially I prefer dairy pastries just like Bloviatrix does. I love the taste of butter and cream in pastry and filling. Please, any of you who have good recipes for this sort of thing, feel free to send them along. Thanks.

Jewish summer dinner...oh, who am I kidding, I eat this in the dead of winter too... Gefilte fish (from the kosher supermarket) Lots of Gold's horseradish Crudite with hummus Too many apricot rugalach