Recipe: Party Hummus 23 September 2008 11:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : advice, America's Test Kitchen, events, vegan, school, vegetarian, recipes, cooking , 2 commentsThere was a fantastic recipe titled “Best Hummus” in the May-June 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated, and I’ve been using it as a guide to improvise delicious chickpea-based dips for parties this summer, with great success. I had sort of been brushing aside the resultant compliments until I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the hummus offered at a few NYU orientation events (sorry, NYU catering!) Turns out I’d forgotten how mediocre hummus can be. On top of that, I realized that I could submit my post about hummus to the third round of My Legume Love Affair, a blog event created by Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook and hosted this month by Lucy at Nourish Me. I mean, really, it’s about darn time I jumped on that particular bandwagon of beany goodness. But back to hummus. The following hints should help prevent disappointment in homemade concoctions.
First, everybody’s taste in hummus is slightly different, but when in doubt, I vote for a texture with more light fluffiness and less pastiness, and this recipe achieves that goal. If you’d rather have something suitable for home decorating projects (caulk, spackle, you get the idea), by all means leave out some oil and water. That said, it is possible to omit ingredients and still get delicious results. Just before our going-away party in Eugene, I discovered that our tahini had grown mold, and threw it out. The hummus turned out fine anyway; I used a little extra olive oil to make sure it got a nice creamy consistency even without the sesame goodness. At our housewarming party here at the Moon Monkey Bar, Grille, and Cocktail Lounge, I forgot the lemon juice and substituted a few extra cloves of garlic for pungenty goodness. If you do this variation, I highly recommend finishing the hummus the same day it’s made, because the raw garlic will get stronger with time and try to destroy you, even if you aren’t a vampire.
And now, on with the recipe. (more…)
Recipe: a spinach salad for Sarah. 19 September 2008 11:31 am
Posted by Tracy in : vegan, salad, events, recipes, vegetarian, friends, eugene, restaurants , 1 comment so far
Another month, another round of No Croutons Required. I haven’t played along since mushroom miso soup, in April, but this time, the challenge from Holler at Tinned Tomatoes was: use fruit in a soup or salad, and it was the excuse I needed to finally get around to writing this recipe up for Sarah, like I promised to do back in May. Yes, I’m a giant slacker.
Speaking of slackery, it’s not laziness that makes me a raw salad minimalist. Instead, it’s because I like to taste food as a recipe comes together, and if I’m not cooking salad ingredients, they usually don’t go through enough of a transformation to keep me interested if I’ve already eaten a bit of everything involved. Peter doesn’t have this problem, and he likes salad much more than I do, so he makes a lot of the salads we eat. But when I’m in charge of salad, I try to keep it simple, lest lunch or dinner fall victim to my sampling habits and short attention span. An added side effect of this approach is that minimalist salads are somehow much fancier than mixed greens with the works.
To get back to the theme of this month’s event, there’s a formula for a green salad so fancy it hardly even needs a vinaigrette: (more…)
Cheese party! Pasta with myzithra, browned butter, and sage 11 September 2008 9:48 am
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, cheese, vegetarian, cooking , 2 commentsThis post is my contribution to Loulou’s La Fête du Fromage event, the results of which will be posted Chez Loulou on Monday, September 15. I look forward to the roundup! (Loulou, I’m sorry I didn’t choose a French cheese this time around. I hope this fête becomes a monthly event so I can have another chance!)
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First things first: Apparently there is or once was a pasta dish with browned butter and myzithra on the menu at The Old Spaghetti Factory, but I’ve never had it so I can’t speak to its goodness (or lack thereof) relative to what I made here. Sorry about that. If anybody reading this is inspired to make my version to compare the two, I would of course be very interested in hearing your opinion. Write me!
Now, on with the cheese! (more…)
Do me a favor, readers. 4 September 2008 4:52 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery, not even vegetarian, history, meat, politics, eating, vegetarian, people , 1 comment so farI need your help.
Together, we can destroy the myth that Hitler was a vegetarian.
Seriously. I know it’s a funny thing to talk about and all — even Eddie Izzard gave it a go in the otherwise entirely brilliant Dress to Kill — but it’s not true. Hitler was no more vegetarian than I am, which is to say he was maybe a picky meat eater, but he definitely ate the flesh of dead animals. There is plenty of documentation of this fact (more on that in a bit). Please, everybody spread this idea far and wide, because I am entirely sick of hearing people snicker about the idea of a genocidal maniac who wouldn’t eat anything that involved killing animals.
I’m bringing this up now because (more…)
Recipe: Cheddar-Scallion Drop Biscuits 22 July 2008 8:11 am
Posted by Tracy in : baking, America's Test Kitchen, cheese, recipes, vegetarian, friends , 5 commentsFun fact! Scallions are green onions; it’s just another one of those East Coast-West Coast dialect differences, or that’s what I learned from this nifty guide to the allium family on Culinate. Drop biscuits are a fun and easy variation on classic buttermilk biscuits, which I have only fairly recently learned to appreciate. This post is for Mom and Dad Boothe, who gave me the subscription to Cook’s Illustrated which brought me the recipe that produced the biscuits that were so delicious last Monday (as well as a different recipe, which convinced me that biscuits were worth eating at all). Here’s hoping good recipe-sharing karma spills over into our apartment-hunting these next few days! (This post was written early Tuesday morning and scheduled for automatic posting some time during our flights to NYC; I hope it worked.) (more…)
