Thanksgiving Update: Chickpea and Butternut Squash Stew

(Main Thanksgiving post here.)

Just a quick pre-Thanksgiving update: Last night I stumbled on, cooked and ate this really special (like, serve-to-guests-for-the-holidays) butternut squash dish from Martha Stewart's site, not usually the first place I look for vegan recipes. Full of protein and fall flavors, and smells wonderful.

It's a little more involved than some of the dishes I post. For example, I had to make my own harissa. But it's worth it. (Harissa is a North African spice mix, and if you've never had it you should definitely try it. There's a link right in the recipe). I did simplify things by using pre-chopped squash (you can get it fresh or frozen) and canned chickpeas.

If you're looking for a last-minute vegan or vegetarian main dish, check it out:

Chickpea and Butternut Squash Stew from Martha Stewart 

Helen Frankenthaler, Thanksgiving Day, 1973

Sweet Pumpkin with Walnuts, and Thanksgiving

If you're looking for vegan Thanksgiving recipes, you only have to google those words to find a million and one great ideas. There are more out there every year.

A couple of good places to start this week are The Gentle's Chef's Holiday Recipes (a $2 download but worth it if you want some really well thought out plant-based versions of meat and dairy dishes) and the chooseveg Thanksgiving page (a collaboration of Mercy for Animals and Isa Chandra Moskowitz who founded the Post Punk Kitchen); or do a search for "Thanksgiving" on the PPK site for lots of wonderful dishes. The Thanksgiving list on oh she glows is very nice. And here's my post from last week about my friend Marina's Tofurkey cooking video.

My contribution for 2014 is this amazing simple, rich, sweet recipe from the Republic of Georgia, slightly adapted from Darra Goldstein's wonderful The Georgian Feast:

Sweet Pumpkin with Walnuts

1 large (29-oz) can pumpkin
1 c walnuts
1/3 c brown sugar

Put the walnuts in a blender or food processor and whir until finely ground. Add the sugar and pumpkin and mix well. Put into an oven-proof pan or casserole and bake at 350 for 20 minutes or so, until heated through.

Elzbieta Gaudasinska, cover for The Sun has Fallen into the Sack, 1975, via 50watts

Tofurkey!

Here's a great Thanksgiving Tofurkey cooking video by my friend Marina, with cute cat cameo, and  recipe.

I have to take some credit for suggesting that apple idea, although of course I'm not the first person to think of adding apples to a roast. In fact, I'm pretty sure I first saw it done as a teenager in a scene in Liquid Sky.

How to Cook a Tofurky with Apples

1 Tofurky Roast
3-4 Sweet Apples, quartered
Baste = 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup orange juice, 1/4 cup olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Place apples, roast (baste roast) - into casserole dish and cover
Cook in oven for:
if Frozen = 2 hours 20 minutes
if Thawed = 1 hour 20 minutes
Take out of oven and turn over and re-baste
Take off lid and place in oven for another 20 minutes
Slice thin and serve or slice and pan fry (to make it extra crispy)

May all beings be happy. Maria Primachenko, Seagulls in the Boat, 1965

Nine Recipes from Mercy for Animals

I'm just going to link to this today:

9 Creamy and Delicious Pasta Recipes

These all look amazing. The whole ChooseVeg site is full of great recipes, and I love Mercy for Animals, the organization it's attached to.

Martiros Saryan, At the Well, 1908

Pumpkin Hummus

Yum.

Pumpkin Hummus

15 oz canned pumpkin
2 T tahini
1 clove chopped garlic
1 T lemon juice
1 t olive oil
1 t cumin
3/4 t salt
(handful chopped parsley—optional)

Put everything in a blender and blend.

Paul Klee, Bluebird Pumpkin, 1939

Pasta with Fried Lemons, Chickpeas and Almonds

Here's a vegan takeoff on this recent recipe from The New York Times, with additional inspiration from the classic Italian dish pasta alla ceci, this Greek dish, a pasta recipe I linked to a while back, and the wonderful site 101cookbooks, which first turned me on to the idea of putting toasted almonds on top of pasta. I dedicate this recipe to my husband, who loves things that are very, very lemony.

Pasta with Fried Lemons, Chickpeas and Almonds

4 lemons
1 lb pasta
4 T olive oil
1 lb frozen chopped spinach, or bag of fresh spinach
large handful of slivered almonds (1/2 c or so)
2 T Earth Balance margarine (optional) 
3/4 t red pepper flakes, or to taste
8 cloves garlic (believe it or not, this is also OPTIONAL)
1 t salt
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 t — 1 t thyme, to taste
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

Put a big pot of salted water on to boil. Zest two lemons. Juice one of them. Set aside the zest and juice.

Cut the ends off the other two lemons and quarter them lengthwise. Take out the seeds. Thinly slice the quarters. Blanch for 2 or 3 minutes in the boiling water, remove with a slotted spoon, and pat dry with a dishtowel or paper towels.

Put the pasta in the water and boil until just al dente. It will be getting cooked a bit more after you take it out of the water, so don't overboil it now. Drain it, reserving 1/2 cup of the cooking water.

Put 1 T oil in a big skillet and fry the lemon slices with a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar, until caramelized—that is, browned at the edges—3 to 5 minutes. Take them out of the pan and set aside.

Steam fresh spinach for a couple of minutes, or if it's frozen, cook it in the microwave.

Toast a handful of slivered almonds in a dry skillet, stirring a few times, until fragrant and slightly browned.

Heat the remaining oil, and margarine if using, in the big skillet you used for the lemon slices. Add red pepper flakes, caramelized lemons, and garlic if using. Cook on medium low until garlic is very slightly browned. Add the pasta water, the pasta, the lemon zest and juice, salt and pepper to taste, thyme, and chickpeas. Mix in the spinach and toasted almonds. Toss until it's all warmed through. Taste and see if you want to add any more lemon, olive oil, salt or pepper.

Enjoy, and have a happy Halloween! 

Edward Gorey, cover for Nineteenth Century German Tales, 1959, via 50watts

Dosas and Tomato Chutney

I cannot make pancakes. I can't. I think it might have something to do with not knowing how hot the pan should be, or not keeping the heat consistent enough. I'm not sure. I just know I can't make them.

I don't claim to be spectacularly good at cooking anything. The whole point of this blog is recipes that are so easy they're impossible even for me to mess up. And I can mess up anything that resembles a pancake, so maybe shouldn't be posting any of those.

Yet I also feel sure there must be a lot of people who can make this delicious, simple, ancient, protein-packed dish. And I enjoyed eating even the wrecks that I produced. So I'm going to post this.

You might ask why I'm using my own recipe instead of linking to one by someone who actually makes these successfully. Mine is basically the same, but simplified. The batter tastes great. I've followed enough pancake and pancake-like recipes written by experts to the letter, and fouled them up anyway, that I'm pretty sure it's not my batter's fault that my dosas don't come out right. It's something about me. Since I won't be there in your kitchen, jinxing everything, I think you'll be okay. Feel free to leave negative comments if that's not the case. Or follow this very nice recipe, from which mine is only slightly adapted.

So: Dosas are are sort of South Indian crepe made from rice and lentils that have been fermented and ground up. So, protein. The fermenting takes a while, but at its easiest it just means leaving them for some hours in a bowl with a plate over the top, so it's not a big deal. Then you cook the dosas in a hot pan, and that only takes a few minutes. You can have them with any kind of chutney; I'm including a recipe for an easy one made of tomatoes and onions. You could also just buy chutney at the grocery store.

Dosas

1 cup raw brown rice
1 cup raw lentils, any kind
pinch of turmeric
1 or 2 t chopped fresh ginger
salt and pepper to taste

Put the rice and lentils into a bowl with six cups of water, put a plate on top, and leave sitting out for four hours or, even better, overnight.

Strain them over a bowl, reserving the water. Put them in your blender with the turmeric, ginger and salt and pepper. Blend, adding enough water to make a thin batter, like crepe batter. It should be kind of a buttermilk consistency, or even thinner. You can start buttermilky, then experiment with thinning until you get the thickness you like when you cook them. You don't want big chunks in the batter, but it's okay if there's a little graininess; it shouldn't be perfectly smooth.

Heat a pan, slightly oiled, as you would for crepes or pancakes, and pour in dosa batter. Cook a few minutes on each side. They should ideally come out round, very thin, and crispy around the edges, not lumpy, weird, half-cooked and irregular like all of mine.


Fresh Tomato Chutney

Here's a very simple fresh tomato chutney from the BBC that will go nicely with your dosas.

Piet Mondrian, Wood with Beech Trees, c. 1899