Crispy Cabbage with Vegan Caesar-ish Dressing

I’m going to tell you a secret that isn’t a secret: I’m not vegan. But here’s another secret: I think we should all eat less meat. The pandemic has made me take a critical look at my relationship with meat. How often do I eat meat and animal products and how often do I realistically need to eat meat and animal products? As someone who eats even less meat than most, I wonder why it has such a stronghold on American diets specifically. Factory farming takes insane tolls on society; it’s detrimental to our climate and the safety of meat processing laborers. However, locally sourced meat at the same consumption level isn’t the answer either. Neither is lab grown meat (in my opinion).

But a strict vegan diet can also be out of reach for many, especially due to the cost of some vegan products and the barriers to the “health and wellness” industry (who is represented and to whom is it marketed). So the best I can do and ask of others is to eat less meat and more plant-based meals. Starting with the obvious salad.

I really believe that there are two types of food that are just lesser homemade: salads and sandwiches. Sure, either can be good from your own kitchen, but infinitely better elsewhere. Inexplicable phenomena, I tell you. I attribute this salad success to the dressing and textures. This dressing gets its creaminess from aquafaba, the viscous liquid in your can of chickpeas used most often as an egg-white substitute. I know some plant-based creams use a nut base but I find not everyone has the equipment make a cashew cream or the like. I certainly don’t have a fancy blender, and why would I ask you to dull your blender blades when there’s an alternative?

Lemon juice, olive oil, egg, Worcestershire sauce, anchovies, garlic, Dijon mustard, Parmesan cheese, and black pepper create a traditional Caesar dressing, a savory, tangy, and rich emulsion perfect for coating lettuce and croutons. This is also typically whisked by hand like a mayonnaise (or aioli if you want to be fancy). While these are all pretty common ingredients, sometimes a salad dressing just needs to be simple. The tangy, savory components in my dressing come from lemon juice and grainy mustard. While I love a fancy vinegar, I believe lemon juice makes the superior salad dressing. Plus, I find that the juice from half a lemon is the perfect amount for most batches of dressing, which is easy to figure out. A whole grain mustard brings the umami flavor lacking from this dressing without anchovies and cheese – it’s more pungent than Dijon mustard and compensates for the other missing ingredients. It’s a Caesar-ish dressing for a reason: it satisfies a craving but probably is not an exact dupe.

For the salad: I could wax poetic my love for crispy vegetables covered in a flavorful dressing. Especially when you get some thin and crispy wisps of craggy green edges doused in tangy sauce. That’s salad heaven if such a thing even exists. And this salad showcases the oft unsung hero of affordable, long-lasting produce: cabbage. My mom first turned me onto this and I haven’t been the same since. Plus, when you use the aquafaba to make your dressing you already have another ingredient prepped – a can of chickpeas. Chickpeas get coated in the creamy dressing and give you enough protein to keep you satisfied all afternoon. Totally optional!

While this recipe is for crispy cabbage, you can certainly give this treatment to a number of delicious roasted vegetables like kale or broccoli. Imagine basically eating a bowl of kale chips with Caesar dressing? Amazing! You can also put the dressing on romaine lettuce or massage it into uncooked kale and add croutons for a more traditional Caesar salad experience. Whatever gets you eating more veggies!

I’m not joking, this salad was so good I had to resist chopping and dressing more cabbage and licking the bowl clean. I mean have you ever heard someone rave about a salad? A homemade salad? No, never.

Vegan Caesar-ish Dressing

Juice from half a lemon
2 garlic cloves
1 tsp grainy mustard
2 tbsp aquafaba
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt
Pepper

1. In a blender, combine lemon, garlic, mustard, and aquafaba.
2. While the blender is running, drizzle in 1/4 cup of olive oil. Alternatively, add the olive oil 1 tablespoon at a time, blending to combine between each addition until the full 1/4 cup is incorporated.
3. Add salt and pepper to taste.

These quantities are ultimately suggestions. The aquafaba and olive oil quantities seem to emulsify best at this ratio, but add more or less garlic, lemon juice, and mustard to meet your taste preferences.

Crispy Cabbage

1 head of savoy cabbage
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp celery salt
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

1. Preheat your oven to 400F. Line a baking sheet with foil.
2. Chop cabbage into “steaks,” removing the core.
3. Place cabbage slices in a bowl and coat with olive oil.
4. Add paprika and celery salt and toss to combine. Taste and assess for saltiness – season with salt and pepper to taste.
5. Place cabbage in a single layer on the baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes or until desired crispiness, tossing occasionally.
6. Let cool before tossing with dressing and chickpeas.

You can use this cooking method and seasoning for a variety of vegetables: cauliflower, kale, broccoli, chickpeas. Salad aside, this is a pretty delicious and easy way to roast vegetables.

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This Kabocha, Date, Nut Bread Kept Me Occupied While Social Distancing

Cut it out. Yes, I’m talking to you, regular person who feels the need to criticize anyone baking during this time. It’s a great time to bake anything – whether you’re using up overripe bananas or making a focaccia and pretending you’re in Italy. Let people enjoy THINGS. Let baking be the escapism folks flock to for comfort during a scary and anxiety-inducing time.

So apologies to anyone who wants to force professional productivity on others. No, I will not be writing my magnum opus or conducting vital research. I will be baking because that will keep my body and soul fed and at peace. Stay mad about it.

NOW – why am I using squash for a springtime recipe? Well, because it’s important to use what you have on hand right now. As we all take stock (and make stock – AYYY) and assess what constitutes a necessary trip to the grocery store, we should see what we can use from our home inventory first, and that means checking the freezer.

For as long as I can remember, we never wasted pumpkins or squash. After Halloween and Thanksgiving my mom would take decorative, but edible gourds and kill them. This means roasting and steaming pumpkins and acorn squash and pureeing the flesh into smooth, orangey-yellow sustenance, roasting the seeds too for a salty savory snack. We would be pumpkin’d out with soups, pies, cookies and cakes before running out of puree, so into the freezer went pints and quarts of creamy orange goo for months. Since the apple doesn’t fall far in my case, that’s exactly the chain of events that lead me to unearthing pureed kabocha from my freezer. I also had pecans I used to make a Basically Baking recipe and dates that I found on sale at my shopping sanctuary, Ocean State Job Lot. It was a perfect storm.

This recipe can be catered to whatever winter squash you have, though I’d steer clear of the heartier butternut squash or stringy spaghetti squash. Acorn squash and pumpkin, sharing similar flavors and consistencies with kabocha, would be welcome replacements. This bread will also work with walnuts instead of pecans. You can also omit the dates or nuts and substitute with a full cup of one filling if that’s your jam. You can also omit the dates and nuts altogether! It’s your world, I’m just living in it.

Don’t skip the parchment paper lining if possible; this will make the cake easy to lift from the pan and reduce unwanted crispiness. This kabocha date nut bread should come out moist but not dense and wet – the end product will be delightful enough to eat sliced, and hearty enough to toast and spread with peanut butter.

Baking with a limited kitchen gives you, dear baker, the ability to riff as you please. So riff on people. And take lots of pictures and gloat to your heart’s content online – hell, tag me and I’ll gloat for you.

Kabocha, Date, Nut Bread

1-1/2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 cup pureed kabocha squash

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tbsp. cinnamon

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. kosher salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 cup chopped dates

1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

1. Place oven rack on the middle to upper racks of your oven (we’re baking the cake up there, but we want space so it doesn’t touch the heating element). Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease the inside of a loaf pan and line with parchment paper.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together sugar and eggs until light yellow and a little bit bubbly. Once combined, add squash puree, vanilla and cinnamon and whisk until incorporated.
3. Slowly stream the vegetable oil into the batter.
4. Sift together flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder into the wet ingredients. If you don’t have a sifter or you just hate sifting, whisk flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder in a separate bowl and whisk into wet ingredients until combined, without lumps.
5. Coat dates in a pinch of flour. This will prevent them from clumping together.
6. Fold in pecans and dates until they feel evenly dispersed throughout the batter.
7. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan.
8. Bake for 1 hour, or until golden on the outside, and a cake tester inserted in the thickest part comes out dry.

The Mysterious Meat Sauce

Bestowed unto me, a box of hand-written recipes from my great grandma’s house. Among them are time-stained index cards with recipes written in a combination of English, Italian and dialect with ambiguous instructions, cook times, measurements and temperatures. Except for one. One is written out with clear instructions and ingredients. Clearly not written by my great grandma, the recipe uses full sentences and proper Italian. My great grandma notoriously spoke broken English and wrote in that confounding amalgamation of languages that only which another immigrant could fully empathize.

The whole sheet of loose leaf paper, speckled with pin holes as if it was passed around and pinned to bulletin boards by a number of people, contains a recipe for a luscious lasagna, including a bolognese sauce with optional mushrooms, cream and prosciutto and a buttery bechamel sauce in lieu of layers of melted cheese. Without a proper baking dish, I couldn’t make a full on lasagna, but I knew I needed to understand why this recipe of mysterious origin earned a coveted spot in the recipe box. I decided to attempt the bolognese sauce.

There’s something truly magical about cooking from a hand written recipe. Nostalgia kicks in, even if the recipe or recipe writer is unfamiliar. I felt like the essence of the author was right there with me, instructing me on how to properly brown and season the ground beef. Maybe it’s intuition, but despite never making this recipe or tasting the end result before, I knew exactly when the sauce was at it’s peak and ready to serve.

Now this recipe is by no means revolutionary. It was incredibly simple. The key, however, was in the fats. A little bit of oil and about 4 tablespoons of fat get things going. The carrots, celery and onion then cook in that rich liquid along with the beef and a good amount of salt. Then it’s a waiting game. Once the vegetables have sweat out enough liquid and the beef has cooked, tomatoes are added and the pot simmers for a hour, allowing the meat and vegetables to become soft and homogeneous and the sauce to thicken.

Good lord this rich, thick boy sticks to your bones on a winter night. The tomato sauce gains a silky texture from the rendered fat and butter and the vegetables make the whole dish sweet and complex. Rigatoni is the ideal pasta shape for bolognese, holding beefy treats within each tube. No exceptions.

Whoever wrote this recipe: thank you. This was a real treat (a beefy treat) and I can’t wait to layer this inside a lasagna.

Ragu Alla Bolognese

Olive oil

4 tbsp. butter

1 carrot, diced

1 celery stalk, diced

1 medium onion, diced

1 pound ground beef

1 – 28 oz can or jar of tomatoes (I like to use passata or pureed tomatoes)

1 pound dry rigatoni

Salt & pepper

1. Melt the olive oil and butter in a 4 qt Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed pot.
2. Once the butter is melted, add the carrot, celery and onion and salt. Cook the vegetables until soft, then add the beef. Cook everything, breaking up the ground beef and stirring until the beef is cooked, and everything is combined.
3. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper. Cook for about an hour until the crumbled beef and diced vegetables are thoroughly mixed and the sauce is at your desired consistency.
4. Cook the rigatoni in generously salted water to the box’s instructions. Reserve some pasta water.
5. Combine pasta and sauce in the Dutch oven, adding pasta water if the sauce is too thick. Serve immediately with cheese.

 

Blistered Shishitos with Tangy Yogurt Sauce

Do you ever pull a recipe completely out of your ass? I did. I didn’t even actually make this before suggesting it to my mom to serve at a dinner party. I guess you just have to trust your gut sometimes, right? I was happy to learn that it was easy to make and her guests LOVED it. In fact, it’s making a return on her menu sooner than I would’ve expected.

This recipe draws inspiration from tangy yogurt sauce I love so much. I feel like for so long I associated yogurt with sweetness, but really yogurt it sour and compliments sweet and savory foods with acidic delight.

Now you probably don’t remember the first time you tried certain foods, but I was fortunate to experience fun food firsts late enough in my teens that the memory is still fresh. When I worked on a farm we would occasionally sell produce that I had never seen or tried before. Since I was often asked about flavors or recipes, I took it upon myself to taste anything I had never seen before. This is where I tried tomatillos, thai basil and mizuna greens for the first time, among other stranger vegetables. It was all for the job, trust me. When we received our first batch of shishitos I had questions about the wrinkly light green pepper. Was it spicy like a jalapeno or sweet like a bell pepper? I learned that it can be a little of both. Turns out, every few peppers are spicy while most of them are mild. It’s like jalapeno roulette!

Years later (aka 2019) these peppers are everywhere.

Shishito peppers are small enough to keep whole for this recipe. Plus, the attached stem doubles as the perfect tool to pick up and dip the charred peppers. Flavor and function. You love to see it. You want to dry roast these in a cast iron pan until they blister and take on color. Don’t fear burning them, they taste better with more char.

Arrange them on a plate to cool. While the peppers cool, combine your Greek yogurt, lime juice, grated garlic, chili powder, salt, pepper and olive oil. Let the yogurt sit for a few minutes, as the garlic will develop more flavor the longer it sits. Taste for seasoning and adjust according to what you like. Add more yogurt to make it more creamy or more lime juice for sweetness. Plate the yogurt sauce in a small bowl for dipping or spooning over the peppers.

Finally, let your guests go crazy dipping peppers into the yogurt sauce. Snacky enough to finish each pepper in one bite, and deceptively healthy.

This recipe is flexible too. Can’t find shishitos? Use poblanos the same way, just slice and seed the peppers before charring. You can use lemon juice instead of lime and cumin instead of chili powder. The yogurt sauce also tastes great with cucumbers or with burrito accoutrements (think burrito bowl, chipotle chicken, that sorta thing).