Fair Weather Vegan

Vegetarian Biscochitos

In the past few weeks I have had the good fortune to eat several meals at the home of my friends Pain Perdu and The Rocket Scientist.  They are wonderful cooks and they also select great cheeses, even if they can't always remember which cheeses they are.  TRS is a New Mexico native, and one of the meals was a special New Mexican Shabbat lunch, which included her adapted recipe for kosher or vegan biscochitos, or little biscuit-shaped cookies.  What follows is the recipe with her comments. 

Kosher Biscochitos
Adapted from allrecipes.com Biscochitos 1

6 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups shortening (use veggie shortening, or even butter, or half and half)
1 1/2 cups white sugar
4 teaspoons anise seed (original recipe had 2)
2 eggs
1/4 cup brandy (can use slivovitz!)
1/4 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Directions
    1.    Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C)
    2.    Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Cream shortening with sugar and anise seeds until fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. Mix in flour and brandy until well blended.
    3.    Turn dough out on a floured board and pat or roll to 1/4 or 1/2 inch thickness. Cut into shapes (the fleur-de-lys is traditional). Dust with a mixture of 1/4 cup sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon.
    4.    Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven, or until golden brown.

Notes:
I cut to ~3/8 or 1/2 inch thick, and cook time was ~23 min with vegetable shortening.
Dough did not hold together that well -- I had to roll it out in chunks, wetting my hands to get it to a rollable consistency. Another version of this recipe on allrecipes uses 1/2 cup wine, so that might work better.

Twist on Tradition- Cheese Latkes

If for some reason you are tired of the fried potato variety, check out this amazingly delicious alternative from a friend's family recipe.  It definitely won our latke cook-off.  Serve with a dusting of powdered sugar. 

Grandmom's Cheese Latkes

 2 cups cottage cheese

4 eggs-seperated

1 cup flour

4 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup sour cream

 

Beat egg whites until stiff and put aside

Beat egg yolks, salt and sugar together

Stir in cottage cheese and flour to egg yolk mixture

Add sour cream

Fold in egg whites

Fry in peanut oil  (we used canola yesterday).

These latkas are difficult to flip, so best to use a large metal spatula if possible.

Pumpkin Ice Cream, Etc

I have been attempting to read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an exercise in frustration that I will report on another day, but it has made me more aware of seasonal food changes.  Not that I do anything about them, per se, but there was pumpkin ice cream on the shelf and I picked it right up. 

Because I generally eat non-dairy ice creams Double Rainbow Perfectly Pumpkin was the first of the San Francisco company's flavors I've tried.  It's super-premium, which means a minimum of air whipped in, and also hekshered OU, and gluten free.  Oh, and did I mention it's really good?  Extremely impressive (although at this moment I'm considering what BiRite would do with pumpkin ice cream and nothing could compare to that), natural tasting, fairly subtle pumpkin flavoring and a light, creamy texture.  Following it with Mudslinger's Chocococo does not reflect well on that brand.  If you click on the link, you'll see a charming flash opening in which a contemptuous little girl insists "I hate wussy ice cream."  And in truth, Mudslingers has tried too damn hard to pretend it's not making a dairy-free product.  They're supposed to taste different, as Coconut Bliss has brilliantly demonstrated, but Maggie Mudd's has tried to make regular ice cream out of coconut and what emerges is a heavy, gooey article that doesn't have the refreshing quality of either milk or coconut milk (they create something called coconut cream as a base by gumming it up).  The chocolate flavor is deep and intense, but the experience of eating it is just not that fabulous.  They do make a variety with whiskey and fudge, however, so I'm not giving up hope for them yet. 

What do you eat with ice cream?  Why cookies of course (and a big glass of ice water because the Mudslingers is going to make you hella thirsty)!  But not these cookies, specifically the wheat-free, dairy-free versions.  I don't know that I've ever had a bad Newman's Own product, but these come close.  I blame the wheat-free aspect.  They're not even gluten-free with all that, so why waste the time?  Anyhow, they've still got the quality Newman chocolate, but they're also dry and have a seriously bitter aftertaste.  At least they're hekshered (OU dairy, presumably because of the equipment being used to make dairy products).  But there are a lot of alternatives to try before you end up here. 

More Corrupt Kashrut Officials

This seems like a story out of the early part of last century, when there was so much money to be made in the kosher food industry and so little institutional control, that anyone could set himself up as an authority and any butcher could be certified.  Things are supposed to be better now, but in the course of my search for an opinion that would let me eat catfish (a cursory scan didn't turn up anything, so I had a panini and skirted the issue of whether something cooked on a treyf grill is essentially just as bad), I found various examples of refusals to use the tablet K heksher.  Then it randomly came up in conversation with friends later on.  Although widely accepted within my minyan, the heksher is rejected by one friend because she knows someone whom the rabbi in charge offered to bribe.  What a lovely piece of work.  Thus far the only product I see on FWV that has the tablet K is Belfiore Mozzarella, but I think that some of the foods I've only marked as 'hekshered' have it too (Precious Mozzarella as well, maybe?).  So I'll try to be more careful in future in identifying which heksher something has in case readers want to avoid this one. 

More Tasty Non-Dairy Ice Cream

The real surprise is that I have a Post-Punk Kitchen recipe I've been testing and will be ready to write about tomorrow, but in the meantime, have some coconut-milk ice cream.

Larry and Luna's Coconut Bliss is now hekshered parve with the heart-K.  It's also still vegan, gluten-free, and sweetened with agave nectar.  I found the chocolate hazelnut fudge flavor to be less aggressively coconut-y than prior flavors I've tried, with an extra crunch from the nuts and a strong chocolate flavor complemented by the more subtle hazelnut, which creates a drier sensation on the palate similar to some of their other products.  I suspect this is their homage to nocciola, the traditional gelato.  

Turtle Mountain's Purely Decadent coconut milk mint chip, by contrast, is very icy like a sorbet.  It shares all of the positive production attributes listed above  The mint flavor is quite refreshing and tastes natural.  I am a bit taken aback by the ingredient list, which includes beet sugar to make the (Dutch) chocolate used for the chips, chicory, and carob (the root of all evil), and yet when I was eating it I thought it was delicious, so perhaps I shouldn't have revealed this to you before you tried it. 

It's interesting to me how these non-dairy products, and also something like Soy/Rice/Hemp Dream, use words in their names to emphasize the idyll you will presumably enjoy if you eat them.  It's almost like they're trying to convince skeptics that the stuff will taste good ;) 

Marich Triple Chocolate Toffee

My 'choose the least expensive item on the shelf' strategy pays off yet again.  The company is frankly a wee bit creepy, at least based on its website.  Headquartered in Hollister, it only produces candies that are round, and that includes a line called Trufflz! (reminds me of Dooce and the way she's taken to writing "shingles!" with jazz hands) and one called Scookies, which are ball-shaped bits of cookie dipped in chocolate.  In other words, product naming is not the strong suit.  Marich also kind of overdoes it with the flavor combinations, as this particular candy consists of toffee, a layer of milk chocolate, a layer of of dark chocolate, and a layer of "marbled" dark and white chocolate.  But it is, in the final analysis,  pretty tasty.  You'd expect a toffee to be crunchy, but these are pillowy to the bite with the toffee coming only at the finish, and hints of almond.  I couldn't figure out why the first thought that came to my mind was that they tasted more like baked good than like candy, until I remembered that for awhile some big company was putting out chocolate-covered cookie dough that looked like malted-milk balls, and with all the different types of chocolate cushioning the toffee these candies had a bit of the same texture.  None of the chocolate flavors could come out clearly, but they all melded into a sweet mish-mosh, so if you're not a purist and you're a toffee fan these give good value for the money, plus they're hekshered dairy.  At least you're not paying for something with a name like 'trufflz!' 

Snack News For Veggies And Jews

Little Debbie is putting out a creme-filled cupcake, designed to compete with the curlicued Hostess version.  Now, we know that it will stand in quality relation the way a Swiss Cake Roll does to a Ho-Ho, ie, slightly drier and less decadent. But I believe, pending a check, that Little Debbie doesn't use trace amounts of beef fat in its creme filling.  So it's 'suitable for vegetarians' as the British would say. 

The Holy Grail

It's not just that Zingerman's is chock full of the best food, from their own breads and cheeses to $150 imported balsamic vinegar (yes, it exists).  The most amazing thing about the deli is that clearly its application process requires you to bring documentation that you are among the ten most pleasant, patient people on earth, otherwise you won't be hired.  If, in the midst of the utter chaos of a line around the block trying to reach the sandwiches, and tributaries breaking through the floodwaters trying to get to the cheese counter and the bread stand, you can treat every customer as if she were the only person in the shop, you are a Zingerman's employee.  The one knock on its family of stores is that it worships the pig, and very few of its products are kosher.  The Roadhouse does serve kosher, hand-dipped corndogs that are next on my list of things to try in Ann Arbor. 

Items at or from Zingerman's that are highly recommended, thus far:

Chocolate chunk sourdough bread
Pumpernickel (try it with the whitefish salad)
Gelato (the dulce de leche rivals the texture of Birite ice cream, and the dark chocolate is better than Ciao Bella)
Piquillo pimento peppers 
any kind of pastry, also brownies 
Papa Louie claims that the corned beef rivals that of Shapiro's, previous holder of the world's best deli title

If you can't make it to Michigan, the mail order catalogue is a decent substitute. 

Lake Champlain Sao Thome Dark Bar: The Interview

Friend and loyal reader The Redheaded Stepchild Who Is Not A Whig (one time only nickname run-together!) was recently kind enough to share her chocolate bar, in the hopes that she might gain fame and fortune among the other eleven of you.  Having tasted the bar, I promptly called up the fictional president of Lake Champlain Chocolates, Snidely Q. Whiplash, and conducted the following interview. 

Q: It says on the wrapper "sweet indulgences that capture the essence of Vermont." 
A: That's right.

Q: Sao Thome is a small island nation off the west coast of Africa.  How's the skiing there?  Do they also have a socialist in Congress? 
A: We feel that the 'essence of Vermont' may be interpreted in many ways.  

Q: Has there been any negative feedback from Principe, whose name is noticeably absent?
A: The U.S. embassy was very helpful in quelling the peaceful civil action outside our factory.  

Q: Why does Typepad suck so much at creating posts that include a lot of artificial paragraphing?
A: Possibly their developers were busy playing with their new Wii Fit when it came time to debug that part of the platform.  

Q: If a company describes its chocolate in terms suitable for a pretentious wine, how hard should it be slapped?
A: There was no intent to parrot the wine industry in calling this bar " both fruity and robust" and "exceedingly complex, yet astonishingly pure."  

Q: So, pretty hard, you're saying.
A: No comment.  

Q: Actually, the one way in which chocolate is similar to wine is that it can be either dry or sweet.  Would you describe this bar as closer on the spectrum to Valrhona or Hershey?
A: It is our policy to create completely independent flavor profiles, but if it should bear some resemblance to a product imported from Belgium, we would be unsurprised.  

Q: If I were to open the bar and hear "resounding vanilla tones," should I call a doctor?
A: Lake Champlain Chocolates is indemnified against any action resulting from its use of mixed metaphors. 

Q: Do you have any comment on the statement "this bar is fine, but their filled varieties are better"?
A: As long as you're purchasing our products, no.  

Q: How long, measured in repetitions of the track "Lovestoned/I Think That She Knows Interlude" by Justin Timberlake, did it take this reporter to write the piece?
A: About five, I'd say.  And I hope that she remembered to save it along the way, given that I read the last one was destroyed in a log-in incident. 
Q: Don't ask. 

The Culture Craze

Suddenly, everyone  in America (or at least every woman plus John McEnroe) is supposedly obsessed with this probiotic concept. All of us have been informed that we have deeply dysfunctional gut flora and we must fix them with special bacteria found in yogurt.  Indeed, this was the phenomenon which started Sarah Haskins doing Target Women in order to mock it, so it's had one positive effect.  The organic cheese producers are thrilled, because at long last there is a wider trend that dovetails with part of their own work: creating things with cultures. 

Sometimes,  Fat Louie must admit, she purchases things based on a very simple calculation: which is the least expensive thing on the shelf?  I was searching for cream cheese and Nancy's Cultured Cream Cheese was a good dollar less than the other versions, including plain old Philly.  I was pretty scared of it at first, because I thought the cultures would make it taste sour and also possibly make me sick.  Cream cheese is normally defined by being bland and inoffensive.  'Unpredictable' not a word usually found in the cream cheese lexicon.  Yet, for this brand the element of surprise is quite welcome and will make your breakfast breadstuffs interesting.  A bite may be tangy and sharp (and yes, a bit sour) or it may be slightly sweet.   This cream cheese is hekshered, so you can feel comfortable slathering it on your Izzy's bagels.  The Oregon-based company also has a comprehensive small producer philosophy and will take back your containers for recycling.  It's been around for thirty years and will no doubt outlast the current marketing blitz.  In short, highly recommended.