Category: Food

Frankly, I’m pretty bad at cooking Chinese food. I often wonder if one doesn’t need to be born Chinese to do it properly. But, if you’ve got a pile of home-grown mung bean sprouts, what are you gonna do?

It’s the noodles that make the chow mein. I have no idea where one might get proper chow mein noodles around here. But whole wheat linguini will do in a pinch. After the linguini has been cooked, brown the noodles lightly in an oiled pan and add some soy sauce, then add the vegetables and stir-fry.

You do make your own sprouts, don’t you?

Mushrooms, onions, garlic, and celery — easy winter vegetables

You know you like ’em fried.

I guess there’s no such thing as truly healthy sweets. But one can at least do what one can to minimize the damage. I did a Google search for “vegan molasses cookies” and modified a recipe I found. The cookies I made this evening were made with olive oil, raw sugar, King Arthur whole wheat flour, and blackstrap molasses. They were very chewy and very good. There was no reason to miss having butter and eggs in the recipe. It took only five minutes to stir them up and get them ready to pop into the oven.

Blackstrap molasses may be hard to find in some places, but not around here. Molasses-making, like making apple butter, was an art often practiced in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They used outdoor vats heated by wood fires.

That English teacup, by the way, came from an antique shop in Walnut Cove. I paid $5 for it. Coffee, it seems to me, is best drunk from a truck driver mug made of heavy china. But tea wants to be drunk from a cup and saucer.

If you’re not already a sprout farmer, and you’ve been thinking about getting started, winter is a good time to start. During the summer produce season, I don’t think much about sprouts. But during the winter, there’s no better and cheaper source of little vegetables.

The best source I’ve found for seeds and such is sproutpeople.com. They’re in San Francisco, and you can order online.

While watching the ABC Evening News (not one of my normal news sources), I saw a commercial for green bean casserole. Once you get something like that in your head, you’ve got to have it.

I wanted to make a high-protein, reasonably low fat, vegan version. I just happened to have some leftover cashew gravy. To the gravy I also added a smooth sauce made from sesame tahini and ground roasted pumpkin seeds. I mixed in some cubed tofu. So the sauce contained nuts, seeds, and legumes. There’s a lot of sautéed onion, of course. The bread crumbs came from the last remaining slice of a loaf of sprouted wheat bread. The green beans were frozen.

If you do a quick survey online of recipes for green bean casserole, what you’ll find is pretty terrifying — heart-stopping mixtures of salt and fat. I’ve never met a traditional dish that couldn’t be greatly improved with good ingredients and some imagination.

Cashew gravy

Gravy is one of my favorite comfort foods, but it’s a sin — all that fat and carb. I’ve rediscovered Rosalie Hurd’s cashew gravy from the Ten Talents cookbook. It’s based on cashew nuts whizzed in a blender with liquid. The cashews thicken the gravy when it starts to boil, just like flour. I use soy milk instead of water to make the gravy richer and boost the protein.

I don’t think this gravy would work very well for something like biscuits and gravy (one of my favorite comfort foods). But it’s great as a sauce for things like basmati rice. Make a lot and use the leftover in casseroles of the type that call for canned cream of mushroom soup.

You can also used blanched almonds. Cashews and almonds, by the way, are the least expensive nuts right now at Whole Foods. The price of walnuts has jumped all of a sudden.

I’m an experienced sprouter, and I’ve meant to experiment with sprouted wheat bread for a long time, but I never got around to it until today. Why sprouted wheat? The grain is much more nutritious after it’s sprouted, and it’s said to have other healthy virtues. The bread turned out very good — surprisingly light with a moist crumb and chewy texture.

I used a quart of sprouts (having started with a cup of wheat kernels). I ground the sprouts very thoroughly in the food processor. After grinding, they looked pretty much like dough made from whole wheat flour. To that I added half a cup of water with the yeast, about three-quarters of a cup of King Arthur whole wheat flour, and about half a cup of flax seed meal. I’ve included pictures to show that the dough looked, and behaved, pretty much the same as whole wheat flour.

In the sprouting jar

Ready for the food processor

Kneaded

Rising

Fresh greens are among the best bargains in the grocery store during the winter. This huge mess of turnip greens cost 99 cents.

Dry toasting

How lucky for us that, as a rule, the cheapest foods are also the healthiest. Think: beans, onions, cabbage, squash, most grains, and so on. A cheap and healthy food that is very much neglected is the humble pumpkin seed. Google for “pumpkin seeds” to read up on what they have to offer.

A good rule of grocery shopping is that any food that can be bought in bulk should be bought in bulk. Ironically, Whole Foods, an expensive grocery store, is one of the few stores (in this area, at least) that sells certain staples in bulk. They have pumpkin seeds, along with a nice assortment of nuts and grains. Even nuts, when bought in bulk, are relatively cheap.

But what does one do with pumpkin seeds? They are sometimes sold pre-processed as a snack, roasted and salted. But that’s neither cheap nor healthy. Lately I’ve been dry-toasting them in a pan, grinding them in a small grinder, and using them generously as a topping for things like vegetable and pasta dishes. Add some food yeast and a little salt and you’ve got a nice, toasty topping that can be used like grated parmesan — but the pumpkin seeds are much cheaper and much healthier.

Grinding them saves a lot of chewing!