Category: Food

Here’s a serious attempt at making a low-cost, country-style, no-egg, no-meat breakfast with a little excitement to it. The beans are homemade baked beans, made in a crock pot using organic white beans bought in bulk at Whole Foods. The sausage is my homemade vegan sausage based on mashed soybeans and wheat gluten.

The yellow grits were bought in bulk at Whole Foods. Southerners eat white grits, but I’ve been experimenting with yellow grits. They have a bit more flavor than white grits, and a creamier texture. They’re even a fairly satisfying egg substitute if you put a nice dab of butter on them. Don’t use butter when you’re cooking them, though. You want only 1 portion of grits to about 4 portions of water, with some salt. Boil them for at least 20 minutes, or until they’re properly thick, then let them sit for a few minutes before serving.

The biscuits are my usual vegan biscuits, made with about half unbleached white flour and half whole wheat flour. In the biscuits I use olive oil or refined palm oil as the shortening, and I make vegan buttermilk by clabbering some soy milk with a teaspoon of cider vinegar.

One of the commenters here, Brother Doc, suggested fried apples for breakfast. That was an excellent suggestion.

This is a vegan breakfast except for the butter on the grits. I also used butter to fry the apples.

Vegan meat analogs have become a staple around here. The most recent experiment was an attempt at Lexington-style pork barbecue. There’d be no mistaking it for the real thing, but it was very good. We even ate the leftovers for breakfast (with fried apples, yellow grits, and warmed-over biscuits).

The basic ingredients for the meat analogs are legumes (either cooked, mashed soybeans or garbanzo bean flour), ground nuts (usually brazil nuts), and wheat gluten. The proportions and seasonings are varied according to the kind of analog. Mashed soybeans makes a nice analog of dark meat, and garbanzo bean flour makes a nice analog of white meat. The addition of ground nuts makes a flakier texture (like meat loaf), and the reduction or omission of the ground nuts makes a more chewy texture (like chicken or pork).

I used a homemade barbecue sauce, Lexington style (as in Lexington, North Carolina — ground zero for the type of pork barbecue that is made in this area of North Carolina). The ingredients are cider vinegar (sometimes diluted with water or apple juice), ketchup, brown sugar, black and red pepper, and salt. If you Google for “Lexington barbecue sauce” you’ll find lots of recipes. The smokiness of proper barbecue was missing. Liquid Smoke is on my shopping list. I hope that will help.

I served the barbecue with roasted potatoes, slaw, and homemade rolls. Good eatin’!

What to have for breakfast is a constant problem. The exciting choices always seem to be very sweet (cinnamon rolls, pancakes, etc.) or high in fat and cholesterol (biscuits with gravy and eggs). So I’m experimenting with baked beans for breakfast. It’s easy enough to make a big batch in a slow cooker and then store them in the refrigerator to be reheated.

Beans are certainly a healthy choice for breakfast — low fat, low carb, and a decent amount of protein. Beans also are in keeping with my vow to rely more on legumes and high-protein vegan dishes (such as homemade vegan sausages) while Ken is here. I suspect that, in some cultures, breakfast beans are a staple. I once spent a week in a hotel in New Delhi that always served an “English” style buffet breakfast that included baked beans (from a can). This breakfast buffet was very popular. New Delhi businessmen would come to the hotel for breakfast. I don’t know how English this is, though.

What’s healthy and low-carb and would go well with hot biscuits and breakfast beans? I haven’t figured this out.

Serve them hot!

What could be nicer on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning than hot cinnamon rolls. With coffee. I stopped drinking coffee more than a year ago, but this morning I made real coffee to go with the cinnamon rolls.

They’re easy enough to make. Start with a basic yeast dough. I’ve heard of making cinnamon rolls with biscuit dough, but to me that would not be proper. Make an icing of powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla. Here are the steps.

Roll the dough into a rectangular shape.

Spread the icing on the dough, then sprinkle on nutmeg and lots of cinnamon. Dot it with butter.

Roll it into a log.

Slice the log and put the rolls onto a baking sheet to rise.

When they’ve risen, pop them into the oven.

Vegan meat analogs are becoming a staple around here. By varying the texture and spices, different analogs are possible: breakfast sausage, meat loaf, chicken nuggets, and, most recently, hot dogs. The texture can be varied by changing the proportion of the three basic ingredients: mashed soybeans, wheat gluten, and ground nuts (I usually use Brazil nuts). For example, brazil nuts are great in vegan meatloaf. But when a chewier texture is desired, I omit or reduce the nuts and increase the gluten. The process is the same as the vegan sausages that I described last month.

The vegan hot dogs were a mixture of mashed soybeans, gluten, and garbanzo flour. I seasoned the mixture with dried onion, dried garlic, paprika, and ketchup. Some Liquid Smoke would have helped. That’s now on my shopping list.

I served the hot dogs with homemade rolls, homemade sauerkraut, chopped onions, and lots of mustard and ketchup.

By the way, I’m aware that gluten is deprecated these days. For the small percentage of the American population that is gluten intolerant (less than 1 percent), I understand that. But for the rest of us, gluten is (and for thousands of years has been) an excellent and important food. I am not among those who demonize wheat.

I made the hot dogs for the day before Christmas Eve. For Christmas Eve dinner, I plan to make something a little more chickeny. But we’ll be eating soybeans and gluten, not Ruth, Chastity, or Patience.

For more than 50 years, this has been my favorite cake. My mother first started making it when I was in grade school. I’ve had it as a birthday cake more times than I’d care to count. But since today is Thanksgiving and tomorrow is my birthday, that seemed like occasion enough to make a particularly sinful version of the cake.

I’ve found that this cake loves to have nutmeg, or cherries, or both, in the icing. So to the plain white icing (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla, and soy milk) I added nutmeg. I also threw in some chocolate-covered cherry cordials and let the mixer chop the cherries and chocolate into the icing.

The remarkable thing about the cake itself is that it contains no eggs. The only liquid ingredient is applesauce. This makes a dense, hearty cake that stays moist for a long time and keeps well. My recipe is written in pencil on a very old piece of notebook paper. Here is the bare bones recipe. Experienced cooks will know what to do with it.

Cream together 1 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of butter (I use olive oil instead of butter). Add half a cup of cocoa and mix well. Then add 1 and 1/2 cups of applesauce and mix again. In a separate bowl, sift together two cups plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, some cinnamon, and some nutmeg. Fold the flour mixture into the other ingredients.

Put the batter into two 9-inch cake pans that have been buttered and dusted with flour. Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 18 minutes, until a toothpick stuck into the center of the cake comes out clean.

Many years ago, in Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, I won a Valentine’s Day chocolate contest with this cake. For the icing on that cake, I chopped lots of maraschino cherries into the icing and made the icing pink.

It’s also a vegan cake if you substitute olive oil for the butter. I’ve never tried it, but you probably could substitute coconut oil for the butter in the icing.

I’ve mentioned before on this blog how much I’ve enjoyed the Two Fat Ladies cooking show, which I’ve been watching on DVD. Mostly their cooking is far too meaty and too heart-stoppingly rich for me to want to cook or eat. But I watch them for inspiration, and for insight into the roots of American cookery, much of which comes from the British Isles. The show also is a good travelogue, and good comedy. Their joy in cooking, and the cultural experience they bring to it, make the series a must-see, in my opinion.

They were in Yorkshire on one show, and they made kedgeree using smoked haddock bought in a village fish shop. The kedgeree actually looked quite good to me. I’ll not find smoked haddock around here, but those of us who live inland and who often use canned fish are always looking for new ways to use canned fish other than salmon cakes or tuna salad. In particular, now that we know that sardines are very good for us, it occurred to me that sardines would work nicely in kedgeree. There are a jillion ways to make kedgeree, but the defining ingredients are rice, smoked fish, onions, something green (such as fresh herbs) and boiled eggs. I left out the boiled eggs, having had an egg for breakfast. Chopped celery was the handiest green vegetable I had. I used lots of garlic.

The kedgeree was excellent. Those strong flavors love each other.

Sardines, onions, garlic, celery, and leftover rice