A few months ago, I posted a recipe that I tried to emulate from one of my favorite food places in Pittsburgh, Pho Minh. This is another that I have semi-successfully tried to adapt from a place in my neighborhood called Thai Me Up. This is one of my new favorite places in the city, because you can bring a 40 of malt liquor in there, and no one cares. In fact, if you linger over your 40 for long enough, the chef will bring you the most delicious almond-crusted cake you have ever eaten. Seriously.
Anyway, my favorite thing on Thai Me Up’s menu is Spicy Tofu with Basil and Rice Noodles. It is so good. So, I began searching the internets for a decent recipe, and ended up combining a few to recreate this deliciousness. It is certainly not as good as the original, but it’ll suffice.
The key to this recipe is absolutely Thai basil. I would suggest, if you can’t find Thai basil, that you substitute mint and go for an entirely different flavor—to use regular sweet basil wouldn’t do it justice. You can find Thai basil in most Asian groceries (for you Pittsburghers, I get it at Lotus in the Strip.) You can recognize it in a store or farmer’s market by its small, pointy leaves and purple stem. It tastes much stronger than sweet basil, with a slightly licorice-y flavor.

I also got some of these red Thai chilies for this recipe, the nice thin ones, but you could use regular red or green chili peppers from the grocery store for this as well.

You will need:
Oil (peanut would be great, I only had olive oil on hand)
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Chili peppers, de-seeded and de-ribbed, as many as you’d like
Half a block of extra firm tofu, cut into 1-inch(ish) cubes
About 2 TBS soy sauce
¼ cup of water or vegetable stock (or slightly less)
Large bunch of Thai basil
Rice noodles, cooked according to package directions

Heat a bit of oil in a wok or large skillet. Add the shallot and cook 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic and chilies, cook another minute.

HEY! HERE’S AN IDEA! DON’T RUB YOUR EYES AFTER CHOPPING THE CHILIES. Because I did, and it hurt like hell. I threw myself on the kitchen floor, screaming like a wounded animal and frantically trying to…I don’t know…rub the chili pepper residue from my eyes? With my tainted hands? I screamed to Rob, “GET IN HERE AND TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS SHIT, I’M GONNA BLOG IT!”
He respectfully declined.

Anyway, once you’ve dried the tears, add the tofu to the pan and stir fry until browned on all sides, to your liking. Add the soy sauce and water, stir fry another minute or 2, until the sauce is thickened. Add a big handful of Thai basil leaves, either left whole or chopped once or twice (you want big pieces.) Stir to wilt the basil and remove from heat. Serve the mixture over rice noodles with a Thai basil garnish—it’s too pretty not to!

Now close up!

Now far away again!

So as it turns out, grad school takes up a lot of time. Yeah, duh, right? I just finished my finals this week, and all semester I’ve been sort of fretting about abandoning this blog–not because I care about it, but because I paid $45.99 for the hosting and URL. I kid, I kid. Well anyway, just as things all seem to get busy at once, they all seem to slow down at once too.
Then, my buddy Joe P. of Tower 41 Productions, who is pressing my band’s second album and whom I also proudly advertise on the tote bag I carry around, told me he had a bunch of recipes for me to try out. Add to that, my lone British reader MattJ sent me some lovely curry recipes that could be easily vegetarian- or vegan-ized that looked delicious and I never tried. And Laura’s been baking up a storm! Where is the failure here? Me. Fortunately, I never stopped cooking and having Rob take pictures, I just stopped posting. So anyway, here’s what’s coming up at thefoodsex:

Yeah! And to prove I’m not lying, here’s one of the recipes.

Chickpea Burgers

These were invented in a night of desperation, when Rob and I were both hungry and snipping at each other, as we’re prone to do when we don’t eat…oh, every hour or so. I frantically canvassed our pantry and fridge for stuff to throw together, and this is what happened.

You will need:
2 tsp olive oil
1 shallot, diced (or really, any onion but i like the sweetness of the shallot in this)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3 TBS roasted red peppers, chopped
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/3 cup dry bread crumbs (or slightly less)
2 TBS chopped cilantro, with extra leaves for garnish
2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp chili powder
pinch of oregano
salt and pepper to taste

In a small skillet, heat 1 tsp of the olive oil and add the shallot and garlic. Cook for a few minutes until the shallot is soft. Remove from heat.

Dump the chickpeas into a mixing bowl and smoosh them anyway you can–a potato masher, a fork, your toes, whatever. Alternately, you could do this in a food processor, but make sure not to puree the chickpeas, as you want some chunks in there. Add the garlic and shallot, roasted red peppers, cilantro and spices and stir. Now, begin to add the bread crumbs a little at a time. Start with half of the 1/3 cup and mix. Pull a handful of the mixture out and try to form it into a patty. Add more breadcrumbs if necessary.

Once you have reached a good “burger” consistency, form the mixture into even-sized patties. I can’t remember if this made three or four patties–I was probably too busy yapping at Rob (see above.) Heat the remaining tsp of olive oil in a skillet for a few minutes, but don’t let it get to the smoking point. Carefully place the patties into the oil and don’t move them for about 3 minutes. Gently flip them over when they begin to brown on the bottom, then cook to desired brownness/heat. Serve on a bun with cilantro leaves and roasted red peppers on top.

Oh, how I wish I’d had better buns for these. They would have been so good on a big crusty multi-grain roll, but my whole-grain-challenged better half is a white bread fanatic. Sigh.

Rob ate his with A-1 steak sauce, I ate mine with spicy mustard. Good stuff!

In an effort to use up some of the leftover cabbage from the tofu tacos, I decided to use cabbage leaves as wraps. Now, I can’t seem to type or say the words “red cabbage” without thinking about the movie A Christmas Story, which Rob and I watch each Christmas (alongside National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), so the idea of red cabbage gives me the warm-and-fuzzies. Yeah, I said it. I am emotionally involved with a vegetable. But I bet you are too, or else you wouldn’t be reading this.

Red Cabbage Wraps

You will need (to serve 2):
1 cup wild rice mix, uncooked
1 apple (I used Red Delicious), cored and diced, unpeeled.
1 shallot, diced
1 clove of garlic, minced
2 large red cabbage leaves
handful of salted cashews
handful of parsley, chopped
olive oil
salt and pepper

Cook the rice according to package instructions. This will take 50 minutes, so in the meantime, paint your toenails and watch an episode of Intervention on OnDemand. You deserve it. Did you know that wild rice is not really rice, but in fact a grass? See, learn something new every day. Now you are justified in watching junky television!

Next, heat some olive oil in a skillet and cook the shallots and garlic until the shallots are translucent. Add the cooked rice, apples and cashews, cook until heated through (for just a minute, you don’t want the apples and cashews to lose their crunch.) Remove from heat, stir in parsley and salt n pepa to taste. Simple enough.

Carefully peel two cabbage leaves from the head, keeping them as intact as possible. Cut out the tough, thick stem area in the shape of a V (see picture above.)

Plop a big spoonful of the rice mixture in the middle of the cabbage leaf and gently roll up burrito-style. Stick a toothpick through the wrap to keep it all together. Continuously warn your dinner companion about the toothpick as he eats until he finally says, “Okay! I see the damn toothpick!” Good work.

I served this with spinach wilted in olive oil and garlic with some whole wheat pita slices to load the spinach onto. (What a poorly worded sentence.) I served this alongside spinach wilted in olive oil and garlic. I also included some whole wheat pita slices so we could spoon the spinach onto them. (Too long-winded. You get the idea.)

This recipe was adapted from one I read in last month’s Bon Appetit for Chicken-Lime Fajitas. It translated nicely to being vegan and was totally delicious, though it left me with a lot of cabbage to use up (that’ll be posted later.)

Tofu-and-Lime Tacos

You will need (to serve 2):

Taco shells or tortillas (I’m a soft girl, Rob’s a crunchy guy.)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Olive oil
Green onions
1 lime (for juice and zest, get extras if you want to garnish the plate)
3/4ths block extra firm tofu
Red cabbage
1 avocado
Cilantro
Salt and pepper

In a bowl, mix about 2 TBS olive oil with your garlic, the juice and zest of one lime and some salt and pepper.
Now, slice your tofu into finger-sized lengths. Whose fingers? I dunno, your fingers? You figure it out. Place the tofu pieces in a large Ziploc bag and pour the lime mixture over. Leave a little bit of the liquid in the bowl, you’re gonna use it later. Toss and shake the bag until the tofu is nice and coated. Throw (you can gently place, if that suits you better) the bag into the fridge to marinate for an hour or so. Turn the bag over once if you think about it to make sure it marinates evenly.

Once it’s been in there awhile, grab your trusty big skillet (you can carefully pull it from your closet, if you want. Why are cooking terms so violent??) and start it heating over medium-high heat on your stove. Once it’s nice and hot, dump the contents of the tofu bag in, getting as much liquid in the pan as possible. I think I actually added a bit of water to the mostly-empty bag and dumped that in the pan in order to get all the oil and lime juice out. To the skillet, add some chopped green onions if you so desire. This is what it looked like in my pan:

Cook until, well, it’s the doneness that you like in your tofu. What are you really looking for in tofu? When you find the right doneness, you’ll know.
While the tofu is cooking, slice two leaves of red cabbage into strips. You could grate it, I guess, but I liked the slightly thicker strips that slicing provided. Place the strips in the bowl with the leftover lime marinade and toss them around with about a TBS of chopped cilantro, to just very lightly coat.

Then check on your tofu. Is it done yet? Is it all you dreamed it would be?

It probably isn’t. So, take your biggest knife and slice around the pit of the avocado so you can essentially break it in half. To get the pit out, WHACK it with the knife so the blade is stuck in the pit (this needs to be violent) like so:

This illustration confuses me, as I’ve never seen an avocado so tiny as compared to those giant fingers. But you get the point!

Now your tofu is probably done. Remove it from the heat and arrange tacos as follows: taco/tortilla, tofu, cabbage, avocado. Finish the whole thing with some chopped cilantro.

Here are mine in tortillas:

And here are Rob’s in hard tacos:

It’s been awhile since we made these, but if I remember correctly, Rob’s only beef with them was that the cabbage consistency was a little TOO crunchy when raw, especially in big chunks. I personally liked it, but if that sounds like it would be a problem for you, by all means throw the strips in the pan and cook them around with the tofu until they are done to your liking.
Then again, what are you really looking for in cabbage?

So I finally installed a spam comment blocker, and all is well with the world.

Except the flu.
I was seriously laid up all weekend, leaving the house only to go to an optometrist appointment I’d had scheduled for about a month, and to pick up some groceries yesterday afternoon when I was feeling a bit better.

So needless to say, I needed some soup and I didn’t feel like inventing any. Normally I don’t publish other people’s recipes, so this is an exception. I made Chickpea Noodle Soup, recipe by Isa Chandra Moskowitz who wrote Veganonicon, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan with a Vengeance (catch the pattern?) She is also one of the masterminds behind The Post Punk Kitchen, a site I waste many a work hour on.

So here we go. I made a few adjustments to this, and they are noted below.

Chickpea Noodle Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, sliced thinly
1 cup chopped baby carrots
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups sliced cremini mushrooms
1/2 teaspoon celery seeds
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed in your fingers
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 tablespoons mirin (optional, and I didn’t use it)
1/3 cup brown rice miso (made a substitution here. Apparently our local grocery store chain had some dispute with their miso supplier and had yet to find a new one, so they didn’t have any. To substitute, I found one of those packets of instant vegan miso soup and poured the powder into a bowl, removing the dehydrated chunks of tofu and green onions and used that. A little shoddy, but it did the trick. I am sure this soup would be much better with actual miso. Sigh.)
6 cups water or vegetable stock (used 4 cups vegetable stock, 2 cups of water and one veggie bouillon cube)
1 (15-ounce) can, drained and rinsed (I used two cans for MORE CHICKPEA)
6 ounces soba noodles
Spinach

In a soup pot over medium-high heat, sauté the onions and carrots in the oil for about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, mushrooms, and herbs, and sauté for another 5 minutes. Deglaze the pot with the mirin (or just a splash of water). Add the broth/water and the chickpeas. Cover and bring to a boil.

Once the broth is boiling, break the soba noodles into thirds and throw them in. Lower the heat to medium so that the soup is at a low boil. Cover and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the miso and stir until it’s incorporated. Taste and adjust the salt, and add a little extra miso if you would like a stronger, saltier flavor. (At this point, I also added a few handfuls of spinach. You could also use escarole, kale, chard or whatever you have on hand.)

This soup was delicious. The recipe makes enough for 6 servings, and I definitely ate it for lunch on Saturday and Sunday and still have a whole lot left over. One thing to note is that soba noodles will continue to soak up broth in the fridge, so have a little extra broth in a separate container to mix in (I boiled 2 cups of water with a veggie bouillon cube, and a pinch each of thyme, rosemary and celery seeds.)

Even Rob liked this. Seriously, discovering that Rob likes chickpeas has been a revelation in our house. He ate around the mushrooms, but otherwise cleaned his bowl. SHOCK AND AWE!

All comments are closed until I install a Spam blocker. Good lord!

Pupcakes

I’m starting a category called “Not Vegan and Not Very Healthy” because the bulk of things I’ve been posting here lately are vegan, but Laura’s baking isn’t and sometimes I eat non-vegan breakfast and the like. This is why I say, “I eat mostly vegan.” Simple as that. I win. Besides, these could be easily veganized.

Anyway, I think Laura should start her own cupcake business? Why? Because of this:

If you didn’t look at those and smile, then you are a cold-blooded, heartless monster. Especially the black one at the top with the white eye. Awwww!

They were:
3/4 c flour
3/4 t baking powder
pinch of salt
1/3 c white sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened at room temp
1 t vanilla
1/4 c milk
Bake in an oversize cupcake pan (6 cups on a pan instead of 12) at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. But when using the enormous cupcake pans, you have to watch them closely.

Frosting:
1 stick of butter, softened,
3 cups powdered sugar,
2 T milk
2 t vanilla.
Mix the frosting together and separate them into bowls to do different colors. Put them in frosting bags with different tips to make different fur textures. The eye balls are blobs of white frosting and black gel. The ears are graham crackers cut into triangles, and she put frosting on some of them. The tongues are Bubble Tape bubble gum that she used kitchen shears to shape.

It’s important to note that these cupcakes were inspired by Murphy.

He looks thrilled to have a cupcake made in his image, doesn’t he?

Yeah.

Butternut Squash and Black Bean Chili

I made a big batch of this stuff for RAMBOTHON, which was this year’s version of ROCKATHON, in which a bunch of people came over to mine and Rob’s house early in the day, and we watched all three old Rambo movies and then walked to the theater to see the fourth. All that blood and guts and violence can really make you hungry, and this chili went really fast. Actually, in honor of RAMBOTHON, I’m renaming this to…

BLOOD AND GUTS CHILI

Okay. This was what I used to feed about 8 people, so by all means, scale back if need be.

You will need:
Olive oil
1 or 2 white onions, diced (pureed! You know the story). I used one big one and one small one
3 chili peppers (I’ll get to this in a minute)
2 medium butternut squashes
Handful of grated carrot
1 big can of pureed tomatoes (oh, how I wish it was summer…)
1 big can of whole peeled tomatoes
2-3 cups vegetable broth, depending on how thick you like your chili
2 cans black beans, drained
2 cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained
Lots and lots of cilantro
Lots of chili powder- 4 or 5 TBS?
Salt

Start out by roasting the squash. Now, you could cube it raw and sauté it in the pot but I don’t have a sharp enough knife to do this without losing a finger. Thus, we get out the saw and cut the squash in half and roast it that way. Think I’m joking? Here.

Yes, I realize this is actually a rutabaga. I didn’t get pictures of Rob cutting squash with the saw, but you get the idea.

Anyway, you’ll cut/saw it in half, scrape out the seeds, drizzle it with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place the halves cut side up in a 13×9 in pan (or whatever) with an inch or two of water in the pan, and roast it for 35-40 minutes at 450 degrees. Once it’s done and cooled, you’ll be able to slice it and cut the peel away easily. Cut into cubes and set aside.

Okay. Heat some oil in your biggest pot and sauté the onion and carrot together for a few minutes. Add the diced chili peppers.

(Oh, about those. I use these little red guys but it is difficult to tell how spicy they will be. My advice is to buy more than you need and taste them first. Use the leftovers to make salsa or something. Anyway, I used three in this. Also, this is not my photo, and in googling the phrase “red chili pepper,” I got many photos of Anthony Kiedis.)

So, add the diced chili peppers and cook for a minute or two. Stir in the chili powder (which, by the way, is not spicy. Why is that??) until well incorporated, or so it looks.
Add the cans of tomatoes with liquid, the vegetable broth and about ¼ tsp salt. Bring this to a boil and then reduce heat to low. Simmer about 30 minutes, stirring every so often and breaking up the big tomatoes.

After 30 mins, stir in the chickpeas and black beans. I think I really used about 1.5 cans of each, not 2. Add the cubed squash and bring the whole thing back to a boil. Simmer 15 minutes. Remove from heat, add handfuls upon handfuls of chopped cilantro. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Sorry the pictures are so dark.

This was actually a monumental meal in our house because it revealed that ROB LIKES CHICKPEAS. After insisting for months that he didn’t (having never eaten one.) This changes things. I honestly can’t remember the hot dog count for this one, so I’ll just say MAXIMUM AWESOME and leave it at that.

No, that’s not true. We eat a buttload of squash, but mostly butternut (because it’s so versatile.) But recently I decided to branch out into the world of acorn squash, and I’d say it was a pretty good showing.

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Acorn squash is also considered a ‘winter’ squash, and they are typically smaller than butternut, ranging from one to three pounds. They can be found in most grocery stores, and best of all, they aren’t a total pain in the ass to cut in half. They look like this from the outside:

(Not my photo. I only bought one squash, ya see?)

So anyway, these little guys are perfect for baking or roasting or STUFFING, and I love stuffing things, so that’s what I did.

For this (to serve 2) you will need:
1 large acorn squash
1 yellow onion, diced (or pureed if you are me and have a boyfriend who hates large chunks of onion)
spinach
rice, cooked according to package directions. (I think this would be awesome with wild rice, but white was all I had on hand.)
chickpeas, drained and rinsed
olive oil
cumin
chili powder
garlic powder

Begin by cutting the squash in half width-wise and scraping out the seeds. Drizzle some olive oil in the cavities and sprinkle with plenty of salt and pepper. Place them, cut-side up, in a baking dish with about two inches of water and bake at 375 degrees for around 40 minutes, depending on the size. I’d recommend checking on it after about 30 minutes to see how soft it is.

Once it’s cool enough to handle, scrape out the soft flesh inside, leaving an inch or so on the skin so that the squash retains its shape, because we’re going to be stuffing it. Reserve the flesh. (Doesn’t “Reserve the Flesh” sound like an awesome name for a metal band? “Hi, we’re Reserve the Flesh and this song is called TOUCH THE WOUND!”)

Anyway. In a big skillet, saute your onion in a bit of oil for a few minutes. Dump in the reserved squash and use a wooden spoon to break it up into little pieces if need be. Add a big, big handful of spinach to wilt and stir for one minute. Add the rice, chickpeas and spices, a little extra salt and pepper and heat through.

Once your stuffing is thoroughly heated and you’ve tasted it six or seven times to get the spices right, remove it from the heat and carefully spoon it back into the two halves of the squash shell. Place them back in the baking dish (without the water) and bake for about 10 minutes, just until everything is nice and hot.

I served this with a spinach and radish salad, which I dug and Rob sneered at. I wish I’d added some sun dried tomatoes or even roasted red peppers to the stuffing, because it just looks so bland, even though it tasted pretty good. Rob was really skeptical of this one…like, really REALLY skeptical but he ended up enjoying it. He gave it 8.5 hot dogs (for the surprise factor!)

Tofu Spring Rolls

My favorite restaurant in Pittsburgh, somewhat regrettably, is Pho Minh on Penn Avenue in Garfield. It is a family-run Vietnamese joint with excellent food, and it’s BYOB. While I’ve always dined there without incident, I have heard stories of many insane things happening there. Here is the building. I did not take this picture.

My friend Matt tells a story about walking by Pho Minh with a friend of his, who was saying that she thought the place was shady. Matt responded, “Come on, it isn’t that bad,” just as someone was thrown up against the window inside. I really like Pho Minh.

But none of this is the point. The point is that they have some of the best tofu spring rolls I have ever had, and I decided to try to replicate them.

For this, you will need:

About a ½ pound of extra firm tofu
Hoisin sauce
Soy sauce
Spring roll wrappers
Mai fun rice noodles, cooked according to package directions and then chopped
Cucumbers, cut into very thin planks
Carrots, grated
Cilantro, chopped
Spinach
Sesame seeds (optional)

Start by pressing the tofu and cutting it into slabs about a half inch thick, a half inch wide and two inches long. You can always cut them smaller after cooking them; you just don’t want them to fall apart in the pan. Brush them with hoisin sauce and start heating a skillet—we’re going to sear them.

Once the skillet is nice and hot (it’s important that it be dry, so make sure to use a nonstick pan), throw your tofu pieces in and let them cook. This caused a ridiculous amount of smoke in my kitchen, so I turned on the stove fan. It didn’t help much, eventually Rob came down and threw the back door open and glared at me, shivering. Whatever, the tofu was good.

Don’t move it around too much, but flip after a few minutes. There’s really no science to this, just keep your eye on it. Once it’s all cooked, put the pieces on a plate and pop them in the fridge to cool.

Now, get a large bowl of hot water—not so hot you can’t stick your hands in it, but hot nonetheless. Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in the water until it gets pliable and sticky. Spread it on your work surface and top with a few tofu slabs, some noodles, cucumber, carrots, lots of cilantro and a few leaves of spinach, just for crunch. Roll the bottom part over the pile of goodness and then fold the sides in and roll all the way up. You’ll have to work quickly, as the spring roll wrappers might get a little gunky. This takes a bit of practice, but you’ll get the hang of it.

MMMHMMM.

Here is the inside:

For the dipping sauce, I just mixed hoisin sauce with soy sauce to my taste, and then added some sesame seeds for garnish. This was not nearly as good as Pho Minh’s, but I have no idea what is in theirs. I know, if I were smart, I’d have put it in a light colored bowl so you could see it. I really need some new dishes.

All in all, it was a good meal, although I couldn’t eat nearly as many of them as I thought I could. Rob (who also loves Pho Minh, but he digs the beef soup thing) gave it eight hot dogs.