(Road) Avocado: Let it bean!

I'm at my parents place for the weekend. As a vegan, this means I either eat "the sides", or I cook. So I made pancakes this morning, and I'll make dinner tonight--but last night my brother surprised me by making us all a super-simple and super-delicious red sauce and pasta for dinner.
He tells me it's a recipe from Jean-Christophe Novelli, an amazing celebrity chef who he may have a slight crush on. He makes it all the time and people like it so much he shares the recipe with them. It is one of those awesome recipe that is incredibly simple but also incredibly flavourful. And frankly, it's always a treat to not have to cook dinner and just be eating the same food everyone else is eating.
My brother says to make it with heirloom tomatoes, but he says he has made it in January with crappy winter tomatoes and it's also find. The vanilla bean is unexpected but it seems to add depth and round out the flavours.
You can Google the recipe, but basics are:
Slice as many tomatoes as will fit in a sauté pan in half, and seat a few minutes until soft. While they are searing, add salt and pepper to taste and a pinch of sugar. When tomatoes are soft, squish with a potato masher or back of a spoon to release the juices. Slice a vanilla bean in half, remove seeds and add seeds and the pod to the tomatoes. (When we were cooking last night, my brother's said at this point to add the vanilla and let it be. "Let it bean?" Eye roll.) Continue cooking over low heat to simmer. (The original recipe also calls for star anise but my brother doesn't like it.) Cook until thickened to a paste and add roughly chopped garlic, fresh basil and a drizzle of olive oil. Cook for about ten more minutes to infuse flavours. If it's too sweet, add a touch of vinegar to balance it out. Serve with your favourite pasta.

New Year's Carbolutions

It's the time of year when everyone's vowing to do something different. Fuck that! Watch too much TV, add things to your Pinterest board instead of actually doing things, make snide remarks about people who cut you off in traffic and eat things people say you shouldn't. Including carbs. Actually, eat ALL THE CARBS.
I don't have anything against carbs. My general philosophy is to eat things that have been messed with as little as possible. So if I'm going to eat something that's already made and packaged, I want to eat something that's been processed less, if I can help it. So I usually buy non-wheat bread and pasta for home, and choose whole grains if it's an option when I'm eating out.
Accordingly, when I made today's All-Carb Dinner, I used kamut pasta. I did use white bread for the crumbs, but that's because I had some old sourdough bread that was given to me that I had to use up anyway. So I don't feel guilty, even though it was two kinds of carbs rolled up in delicious fat. And that's the way it should be! Eat good food, be full, and don't feel guilty unless you've done something horrible like poke kittens in the eye.
The All-Carb Dinner pasta dish I made tonight was Pasta con Aglio e Olio--pasta with garlic and oil. I had variations of this a few times while I was in Italy--let's face it, a vegan often gets simplest pasta on the menu by default. Some variations had tomatoes or parsley or chili flakes added. My extensive five minutes of googling tells me that adding the breadcrumbs makes this a Milanese version. (Don't be confused by the shallot and greens in my photo--they were for food styling only, because plain pasta makes for boring-ass photos.) In my opinion, it's the breadcrumbs that make the dish, although like many traditional homey foods, it's whatever version your mom/dad/gramma/grampa made for you that is truly authentic. For you cooking pleasure, a not-a-recipe follows. Vary it until you find your favourite, then tell your kids/your cats/the people who borrow your pepper mill that it's the only authentic version around.

A not-recipe for Pasta con Aglio e Olio
Add as many servings as you'd like of your favourite strand pasta to boiling water. Lower heat if it starts to boil over. While the pasta cooks, chop as much garlic as you'd like (I used four small cloves for one serving but that may be while I'm still single); and using the smallest holes on a metal grater, make crusty stale bread or lightly toasted fresh bread into as many crumbs as you can before you get tired. I used about a quarter cup to top one generous serving of pasta, but some recipes I saw called for a  little over a third of a cup per serving. When the pasta is almost al dente, heat the oil in a frying pan. When hot, add the chopped garlic and saute, stirring occasionally, only until the garlic is white and fragrant. Add the breadcrumbs and fry for a few minutes to toast the crumbs. When the pasta is al dente, drain thoroughly and add to the pan, stirring to coat. Add chopped parsley or chili flakes if desired. Plate, sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste and serve.  

Store-bought whole wheat gnocchi with garlic and vegan parmesan.

Pasta e fagioli saved my life

Pasta e fagioli: this dish saved my life. Okay, so maybe not my entire life, it maybe just stopped me from being super hungry and cranky on vacation after a long day of sight-seeing. and maybe the particular restaurant I went to happened to also have a very cute and flirty waiter, but hey, it was Italy, so there were lots of cute and flirty waiters. But this dish certainly was delicious! And the waiter may have proposed to me in Italian while I was eating it, but hey, it was Italy!
This is one of those accidentally vegan foods that you mention when vegans say, "But what do you EAT?!?" (Have you ever heard of a little place called ITALY?!?) Of course, it can sometimes be made with meat broth, but unlike dishes you have to veganize, this one is easy-peasy without substitutions.
Some pasta e fagioli recipes you see are rather, um, chunky. But the picture shows the dish as I ate it when I was in Italy: the beans were partly pureed into smooth deliciousness and partly left whole, and combined with cooked pasta. That's it! A basic recipe follows, from my memory (which is why there are no quantities) but you can add herbs and spices as you like. More beans and less water will make the soup thicker. A side dish of grilled veggies rounds out this meal.
Cute Waiter Pasta e Fagiloi
Vegetable stock
Minced garlic
Chopped onion
Cooked pinto beans
Cooked pasta
In stock pot, saute garlic and onion until soft. Add stock and cooked beans and heat through. Using strainer ladle, remove 1 cup of beans and set aside. With stick blender, puree remaining stock and beans. Return beans to pot and add cooked pasta. Heat through, season with salt and pepper to taste and serve with bread.

Conscious cooking

As a reward for making it through the holiday season, I bought myself The Conscious Cook, by Tal Ronnen. Since I lasted six months of being vegan without buying even a single cookbook (gasp!), I have, of late, been buying myself almost every vegan cookbook I even remotely coveted. But The Conscious Cook is different-- in a very intimidating way. It bills itself as French-style vegan cooking, and it really is. A lot of the dishes involve multiple steps, with several prep-heavy items being combined on one plate. It's really complicated. You know, sauteed something on a bed of something beside something else, on top of pureed-something sauce, sprinkled with diced something. The kind of thing I would never make for myself.

So I put off buying the book. When I did buy it, I thought of it as food porn, something I could look at, and drool over, but not partake in myself. (Remember, this is food porn I'm taking about here. Get your mind out of the gutter, and stop picturing me covered in pureed something.)

But I was wrong. I have made several of the dishes. While some of them didn't turn out quite right, and some of the fake-meat ones were not as divinely-inspired as the book claims, the one I made tonight is already a staple. It has become, in my iteration, spinach pesto; and tonight I'm planning it for a weekday lunch, with kamut rotini and a bowl of butternut squash and shiitake soup. I'm sure it will be delicious, despite not being on a bed of something and sprinkled with something, diced and sauteed.