A (vegan) Fall Dinner, and book recommendations!
This week: a return to the Worst Food Pictures Imaginable....
Also, this is either a plus or a minus, another student in the library school lounge saw me eating this and said "that looks healthy"
Have I told you how I feel about prep times? I'm sure I have, but it bears repeating: recipe writers are lying to you.
I just saw a recipe that said two, very conflicting things: 1. it had a 5 minute prep time, and 2. it called for peeling and dicing a butternut squash.
Have you ever peeled and diced a butternut squash? Doing that takes... more than five minutes, let's be honest. It's time consuming! Let alone all the other things that you have to do when you're preparing food: measuring stuff, finding stuff.
So, maybe this recipe was assuming you would buy a prechopped squash? I guess people do this, but I cannot imagine it. It's expensive and wasteful, also I like, never see prechopped squash except the weird crinkle cut ones for people who pretend that their foods are actually other foods.
Anyway, 5 minute prep? That's a lie!! That is not true!!!! This recipe that I've written makes no claims about the duration of the prep time, because we all work at different paces, all of our ovens and stovetops burn at different intensities (the low on my stove is a medium low at best) and so if I said "onions will take 15 minutes to caramelize" (a claim I have seen made before) you would read my recipe and think "wow Willamae sure is untrustworthy!" Instead of giving you a lot of times for things, I will instead say this: I have written the recipe so that, if you follow it, you will be doing a number of things for the entire duration of the cooking time. This means, however, that you do not have to get a bunch of stuff ready and then start cooking. You just, keep going for a while and then it's done!
Here's another short digression. Are you removing the germ from your garlic? Do you know what the germ is? The germ is that kind of root looking thing that you often find in aged grocery store garlic. My garlic almost always has a germ in it because new york city produce is trash. Removing the germ is a quick and easy way to improve the taste of your dish. A garlic germ increases the harsh bitter taste that some garlic can have, while detracting from the good garlic-yness of it. Removing the garlic germ is easy and also kind of fun.
Okay, moving on. This week, we're making dinner. We're making vegan dinner, at that. I've been sick for the past few days, and noah was sick a week or so before that, so we ate just, a godawful amount of soup. Like, it was good soup, but at a certain point, eating more chicken noodle soup will not make you feel better, it will in fact make you feel as though your blood is no longer blood, but is instead broth. Can you tell how jazzed I am to eat solid foods? (and not meat again, I'm so tired of chicken)
Here's a few quick recommendations for you:
I recently read and loved Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali. This book is about Janna Yusuf, a 15 year old girl who is trying to process her feelings of shame and anger after being assaulted by another teen in her close-knit Muslim community. This book is all about relationships and emotional growth, but romantic relationships, while they feel really important to Janna at first, take a bit of a backseat to her relationship with her friends, her family, and herself. This is a pretty heavy book, that really deals with Janna's emotional processing of her sexual assault, so be aware of that going in, but the story it tells is terrific.
On a lighter note I recently reread When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon. This is a fun and fluffy romantic comedy about a girl who goes to coding camp the summer before college only to realize that the reason why she was allowed to go to this camp is because her parents were trying to set her up with a boy, hoping that they'd get engaged. This is just a lot of fun, very low intensity, all in all, a really good time. This is a book all about listening to other people, and the joys of paying attention to those you are close to. It's delightful.
Another recommendation:
I have transitioned to using a bookmark manager to store and track my recipes. I use raindrop.io which allows for tagging, which means that if I have some leftover kale I can look for all of my recipes that are tagged "kale" and cook one of them. If you use bookmarks as a way to manage your virtual cookbook, and you have a free afternoon, I cannot recommend it enough, it's helped me to branch out and make things that I've had saved for ages but had forgotten about. It also allows me to track things like vegan recipes, which is convenient because I don't only cook vegan, but I want to be able to find good vegan options when I want them. Managing your bookmarks this way requires a lot of organization, and a lot of planning. My method is: I read a recipe before I save it, and then I tag some of the most important features of the recipe, so if a recipe is vegan, or veganizable, I'll tag it that way, if it's a meat dish but I plan to substitute out the meat, I'll put it with my other vegetarian dishes and I'll change the title to reflect the fact that I'll probably use tofu. If you like to keep track of recipes that you've cooked, this is also a good way to do that.
This is a recipe I wrote, you can adapt it in other ways if you want, also, it is vegan unless you add cheese. It is part sheet pan dinner, but also part not. It's inspired by a recipe where you cook everything on one pan, and sometimes "one pot" is actually a way of making your life harder, not easier. The recipe I was inspired by called for (ugh) caramelizing sweet potato chunks on the stove. No thanks!!!!
Fall Noods with: butternut squash, crispy kale, and mushrooms
Servings: I dunno, I got 2 dinners and 3 lunches out of this recipe, your mileage may vary.
Timing: I started cooking at 6:39 and was finished with 8:08 because I started boiling my pasta water late, if you start it when I tell you to, this shouldn't be a problem for you. Also, I was convinced I could get my onions to caramelize more, you could add the shiitakes sooner than I did if you are happy with your onions faster.
Ingredients:
a small butternut or delicata squash roughly a pound but like my squash was 1.7 pounds and I used it all and it was fine just get a small squash. Also, if you go for a delicata you won't have to peel it.
1 bunch of kale (tuscan kale is nice)
1 lb box of orchiette
olive oil
6-8 oz shitake mushrooms
a yellow onion
4 cloves garlic
1 scant tablespoon grated ginger
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 400. Peel and dice squash while oven is heating up, toss in a bowl with salt and pepper and olive oil (and maybe a bit of cayenne if you want, but not too much). Put on a sheet pan and roast for 30 minutes (I recommend not putting parchment down on the sheet pan, because this will prevent good browning).
While the squash is roasting prep your other vegetables: First, wash, dry, and roughly chop the kale, put it in the bowl where you had the squash, toss with some more olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Then: heat a sautee pan to a good medium low.
Then: slice the onion, it doesn't need to be a super fine dice, it's going to get a bit caramelized so they'll soften up. Note: because you are cooking the vegtables in a sautee pan, the onions will not exactly caramelize, cook them lowish, adding more oil as necessary, so that some are browned and a bit crispy, and all are soft.
Once you've diced the onion and your pan is a good even temperature, add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, let that heat for a second, and then toss in all the onions. Add a bit of salt and a lot of pepper. You want them to caramelize as much as possible, but again, they won't fully caramelize, because due to the width of the pan the water from the onions will evaporate too quickly for a single onion to caramelize.
Let the onions cook on a low heat for a while, while that is happening, slice your mushrooms, chop your garlic, and grate your ginger.
Put your pasta water on to boil, and remember, it should be salty like the sea!
Okay! It's been 30 minutes, toss the kale on the sheet pan with your squash, stir it around, and bake for another 10 minutes. (don't forget to set a timer! kale burns quickly)
How do your onions look? If they're softened and a bit brown: raise the heat, add a bit more oil, and toss in your shiitakes. Once they've browned a bit, toss in the garlic and ginger and lower the heat, let them soften some. Once these vegetables are done: add the vegetables from the roasting pan into the sautee pan (if there's room) and then add: 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, toss the vegetables to combine, and taste. Add more like, salt or pepper or whatever.
Okay! Cook your pasta until it is about al dente, but maybe not quite. Reserve about a cup or so of pasta water (you won't use most of it, but good to have an abundance of caution.)
Okay, add your noodles back into the pasta pot, add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to them and toss, then add the vegetable mixture and some pasta water, tossing a great deal. If you want parmersean with this, add it while tossing (we added maybe a scant quarter cup)! If you want to have it vegan, don't do that, but you may want to consider tasting and adding a bit more soy sauce or balsamic (or both) because the parmersean adds a bit more depth of flavor.
Okay! It's done.
Let me know if you make this! If my recipe needs any streamlining... well you're out of luck, this isn't a blog so I can't update the recipe. Regardless, I think you will like this dish, because it is very good.
I hope you're having a great week, I'm making a very spooky halloween cake for Elizabeth's party on saturday and I've bough black cocoa to make it Super Goth, maybe I'll put it up next week. If you/your child/your pet wears a good costume send me a pic, thanks bye!