What I Had for Lunch Today: A Taste Explosion in My Mouth

I'm pretty nosy, which is why I probably enjoy being a journalist so much. My job is more or less to travel around, eat new foods, have new experiences, ask personal questions, and get paid for it. At my age, I've seen and done quite a bit, so when I encounter something I haven't seen or tried before, I get excited.

I'm also pretty open to suggestion. I can still picture, clear as day, a tray of muffins in the cafeteria of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, where I was working in 1970. One of the muffins had a little flag stuck in it, saying, "New flavor! Try me!" Guess which muffin I picked? Basically, whenever I get that message--whether it's written on a flag or not--I'm there.

Today I was flipping through a new cookbook (well, "uncookbook" to be precise: it's all raw foods), and I read this sentence:

"Words cannot explain the taste explosion in your mouth when you eat this."

Suddenly I had to try this dish, a.s.a.p.! The book is Love on a Plate: The Gourmet UnCookbook, by Cara Brotman and Markus Rothkranz, and the dish is called simply "Mango blueberry mint." I didn't have all the ingredients, so I immediately went to the store to stock up. Got home, realized I had forgotten one item, went right back out again. The dish itself, fortunately, only took a couple of minutes to throw together once I had all the ingredients. Garlic, ginger, jalapeño pepper, and fresh mint leaves, all chopped up and tossed with mango chunks and blueberries, then a few squirts of fresh lime juice and a sprinkle of salt. "Explosion" is right! This is my new favorite food.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Love on a Plate

I usually have a salad for lunch, and I don't vary the salad much. Romaine always, maybe a little tomato, red pepper or celery, a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. On top, a sprinkle of chopped nuts, fried tofu, chickpeas or some such. I'm happy to report I'm out of my salad rut with the arrival of this interesting new book, Love on a Plate.

Love on a Plate is an "uncookbook"--all the food is raw. That means no ingredient is ever processed at over 118 degrees Fahrenheit. A blender--preferably a powerful VitaMix--and a food dehydrator are frequently called into service. However, nothing more than a cutting board, a sharp knife, and that old Hamilton Beach blender you got for a wedding present in 1986 will get you pretty far along if you're not quite ready to commit to the raw vegan lifestyle full-time.

 The authors, Cara Brotman and Markus Rothkranz, look like they've sprung fully-dressed from somewhere on Rodeo Drive: tanned, blond, healthy, white and gold outfits glittering in the Southern California sun. Cara is a longtime vegan raw foodie, chef and restaurateur. Markus is a movie special effects guy turned health guru. Together they make living a healthy life simple, attractive and fun.

ALL of the food in this book is extremely easy to prepare. Some of the ingredients need a few hours in the dehydrator, but not counting that drying-out time, a recipe might take three minutes to whip up. Today I made a cheese, date pineapple salad with kale, and it was pretty yummy. I love kale, but I never use it raw in salad. I stuck to the recipe, though, mixing it with cut-up pineapple, dates, scallions, cashews and the non-dairy almond cheese. The dressing is olive oil, cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and nutritional yeast (that's the pale yellow powder with the cheesy flavor, not the stuff you use for baking). Again, I'm not a big fan of vinegar, balsamic or otherwise, but I stuck to the recipe. And it was great! All the flavors and textures mixed together perfectly: sweet, sour, salty...creamy, chewy, crunchy: perfection. I even licked the plate.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Vegan Egg Salad

I'm trying to eliminate eggs from my diet, for a variety of reasons. In dishes that traditionally call for eggs, substitutes can be made, with varying results. In pancakes and layer cakes, for example, I dare you to tell the difference. In eggplant parmigiana, on the other hand, making a credible batter is difficult. Egg salad, fortunately for me since that's what I was craving today, is one of those dishes for which excellent alternatives exist.

To make this particularly successful batch, I started with pressed tofu from Trader Joe's. It's quite dry, so it doesn't need to be weighted, drained, or dried off with paper towels. It's also organic, nutritious, and cheap. I mashed it up with a fork in a little bowl, then added a couple of spoonsful of nutritional yeast, a couple of pinches of black salt, and some turmeric cooked in a bit of oil. I then had the equivalent of a hard-boiled egg or two.

To the "egg" mixture, I added a couple of dollops of vegan mayonnaise, some sliced celery, and some chopped-up bread-and-butter pickles (which I had made only yesterday), salt and freshly-ground black pepper. I dumped it on a plate of shredded romaine and garnished it with tomato and parsley. That's a soy mocha latte with it.

Nutritional yeast, by the way, has a cheesy or nutty flavor, which gives a boost to notoriously-tasteless tofu. It's also got 9 grams of protein in every two tablespoons. The tofu itself has 14 grams of protein per serving (one serving = a bit over three ounces), so do the math: the vegan version is actually much higher in protein than real egg salad.

The black salt--which I purchased in a local Asian market--contains a lot of sulphur. It comes in big chunks, so I have to pound it into smaller pieces and then grind them up in a mortar and pestle (at least until I find my salt grinder). Although the big chunks are blackish, the ground-up salt is pink. The sulphur in the black salt adds that totally authentic eggy aroma and taste.

Turmeric is mainly for golden color, though it adds a bit of flavor also. But please: never use turmeric raw! You have to fry it in oil first. NEVER just sprinkle it in at the end, no matter what the recipe says. In most traditional recipes calling for turmeric, frying something is part of the cooking process anyway, so that's when the turmeric goes in. For "egg" salad, it's kind of weird, because it's an otherwise no-cook dish. But if you're like me, you can taste the horrible raw taste of uncooked turmeric, and so you get out your tiny cast-iron skillet and add your pinch of spice to a few drops of oil and fry for a few seconds. The result is a cheap, nutritious, cruelty-free vegan dish that tastes pretty much exactly like the original.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Vegan Sausage and Potato Scramble

If I had to run out of my house with only one item--in the case of some disaster like a fire or flood--it might well be my cast iron skillet. (The family photos are all in the cloud.) These days the skillet rarely makes it back into the cupboard; it's about the only cooking implement I put on my stove. Cooking for the family was a Norman Rockwell-style affair; cooking for myself is usually a one-dish meal.

Today it was onions, red peppers, green peppers, vegan Italian-style sausage, Yukon Gold potatoes and a handful of those little cherry tomatoes, all stir-fried in olive oil with a bit of sweet basil and oregano. A good meal for a rainy day.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Dandelion Omelet

This omelet is nothing but a few shallots and a handful of dandelion leaves, chopped and sautéed, salt, pepper, and one egg. I had it with Tuscan pane toast, slathered with boysenberry jam, a few organic strawberries with sugar and a splash of triple sec, and Café Bustelo with molasses and cream. A real taste of spring.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Polenta with Italian Sausage and Dandelion

Friday night, so, a glass of wine. Vino de tavola, so, something with polenta. Spring, so, dandelion greens. Something spicy needed, so, vegan Italian sausage. Garlic, shallots, olive oil, a few mushrooms, a spoonful of marinara, some crushed red pepper. Pantry to table in twelve minutes.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Tomato Soup with Farro

Soup is odds-and-ends food for me. This one is three or four shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic, chopped and sautéed, plus a few tablespoons of leftover marinara, vegetable bouillon, fresh parsley and dill, and a handful of farro, simmered till the farro was tender. I finished it with a splash of heavy cream, a pat of butter, homemade croutons and a grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano. For dessert, a couple of chocolate digestive biscuits and an espresso. I would've enjoyed my lunch more if a certain dog and cat had not been staring fixedly at it the entire time. Note to Taz: onions, chocolate and sugar are all bad for dogs.

Liquor for Lunch

One of the best things about working from home is, you can drink on the job. Not that I drink all that much, but when I make a pasta dish for lunch and want to have a glass of wine with it, I don't have to think twice. It's perfectly legal. I remember when I was working at Intel, some poor guy had a couple of beers on his lunch break and ended up in a world of trouble, suspended I think. Of course, every box of wafers we handled had a street value of four million dollars, and the equipment was worth much more than that, so probably it was a good rule. But it's not my rule any more.

I don't even like pasta much, so when I do cook it, I always add a lot of other stuff to it. This was a dribs-and-drabs meal anyway...some forgotten tortellini in the freezer and a bit of leftover marinara from last week's pizza. I turned it into vodka sauce with olive oil, shallots, artichoke hearts, rosemary, heavy cream and of course the vodka. I jazzed up some overripe kiwis, persimmon, and raspberries with a splash of Chambord, and ate both dishes with some Merlot. And there you have it...liquor for lunch.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Braised Cabbage and Pierogi

Braising is a cooking method I like very much, right after stir-frying. It's a combination of frying and boiling...what you do when stir-frying alone would burn the food before it would cook it through. You just begin by frying your cabbage or whatever, then add a bit of water and cover the pan till the food is tender. Sometimes I reverse the process: moist-cook the whatever, then add oil as the water evaporates to make the food crispy.

These were the outer leaves of a head of cabbage, sort of tough to be handled with oil alone. Slivered and braised, with plenty of garlic, they were delicious. And those are some of the homemade pierogi I had frozen at Christmastime. A nod to both my Irish and Polish heritage.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Parmesan Soup



Remember when bones were free, or practically so? You asked the butcher for them when you wanted to make soup, or give a treat to your dog. Suet was the same: a waste product that bird lovers knew to ask about. The butcher went in the back and reappeared with a hunk, which you could wrap up in a piece of chicken wire and hang up in the back yard to attract chickadees and woodpeckers. Then the markets got wise, and now the fat and the bones cost as much as some of the meats.

Same thing with cheese rinds. Stores used to toss them; if you knew someone in the back, they might save them for you. Most people wouldn't even know what to do with them in any case. But then word got out about using them for gourmet soup, and now they're six to ten dollars a pound.

Here's some of that gourmet soup. What it lacks in beauty, it makes up for in taste. Half a pound of Parmigiano Reggiano rinds, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, a handful of Italian parsley, salt and pepper simmered for an hour with a quart and a half of water makes the broth. It's supposed to be strained, and the solids discarded. As if! I just chopped up the cheese into chewy nuggets and kept going. I added cooked cannellini and some ribbons of kale, cooked it a bit longer till the kale was tender, then drizzled olive oil over it to serve.

This is divine with a couple of slices of toasted sperlonga. Although spring is technically less than a week away, it's still ridiculously cold here, with views of snowbanks from all the windows. A pot of this will be long gone before anyone at the Emory House wants warm-weather fare.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Adzuki Sprout and Rice Noodle Stir-fry

Adzuki beans are one of the most nutritious foods you can eat. Besides being high in protein (17grams per cup), they contain B vitamins, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper, manganese and folic acid. Sprouted, of course, they are even more nutritious and easier to digest.

In China, the adzuki bean is commonly referred to as 紅豆 ("red bean"). Cooked with sugar and mashed, it becomes red bean paste, from which so many Chinese sweets are made: mooncakes, sweet soups, ice cream, et cetera, et cetera. Actually, red beans are popular all over Asia. In Japan, there's even an adzuki-flavored Pepsi.

For my lunch, I stir-fried them with onion, garlic, sweet orange pepper, peapods, ginger, and boiled rice stick noodles. I seasoned the dish with toasted sesame oil, tamari, lemon zest, and a sichuan condiment made up of hot peppers, sesame seeds, peanuts and a few spices in soybean oil. Lan Chi Szechuan Sauce with Garlic would have been my first choice for a condiment, if I had had any. It seems to be disappearing from the shelves of Asian markets. But that's another blog entry.

What I Had for Lunch Today: Sichuan Red-cooked Eggplant

About thirty years ago, there was a Chinese restaurant in Enfield named simply "Szechwan Restaurant." The waiters were crabby and made nasty comments when you brought a kid along; the chef didn't cater to American tastes. No generic menus here. Sea cucumber salad, weird jellied things, stir-frys presented in deep-fried noodle nests, and when they said hot, they meant HOT! They had an amazing sauce they would bring out to make the food even hotter, too. I had never tasted Sichuan food (well, it was "Szechwan" then; Pinyan romanization took over in 1982), and I was in heaven.

Then the restaurant burned down. I inquired in vain for the chef--he must have gone somewhere--but never could figure out where. I visited Chinese restaurant kitchens, trying to buy similar sauces from them (no go!). Finally I hunted down a cookbook in the library--Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook--which had recipes for all of my favorites from that vanished place. I wrote them down and I have been making them ever since. This eggplant dish is one of those recipes.

It's eggplant cut into pieces "the size of your thumb" and stir-fried, then removed. In the same pan, you make a sauce by stir-frying a few cloves of garlic, chopped, then adding a tablespoon of hot bean sauce (I use Lan Chi Chili Paste with Garlic), half a cup of broth, and a couple of tablespooons of soy sauce. Put the eggplant back in and cook till all the sauce is absorbed. Garnish with Chiangking vinegar, toasted sesame oil, and some of those chives growing next to your driveway. I serve mine with brown rice.