Fonio

The other day I very much enjoyed watching two marvelous animated films on Criterion Channel: Kirikou and the Sorceress and Kirikou and the Men and Women. Both films are magical, artistic, deep creations, and I found them engaging and captivating. They involve a tiny boy, Kirikou, and his courageous fight against a sorceress and her fetishes on behalf of his people–even as said people are not always as gracious about his efforts as they should be. Highly recommended!

I mention this because, at some point in the second film, one of the village women comes to stay at Kirikou’s house. Kirikou’s mother invites her in, saying:

This caught my attention. Fonio? What is it? I had never heard of it, so my eyes were glued to the screen to see what it would look like. And here it was:

This looked exactly like something I would very much enjoy eating, so I quickly looked it up. Fonio turns out to be a West African grain, gluten-free and rich in protein and nutrients. It cooks very quickly and can be used similarly to quinoa, couscous, or rice. A restaurateur in Harlem wants to uplift Fonio and make it an exciting new grain option for Western palates, noting that, by contrast to quinoa (where the Western demand removed it from Andean tables), Fonio had been rejected as a food staple for quite a while in West Africa on behalf of Western options.

This is quite sad, because fonio is not only healthy, but delicious! I ordered a bag on Amazon; it’s quite economical, as in cooking it expands considerably. The fonio-to-water cooking ratio is 1:2, and you can add a teaspoon of oil and a little bit of salt (though it’s not really necessary, in our experience.) It comes out fluffy, kind of like couscous or quinoa, and has a very flavorful, nutty taste. I can see serving it with a variety of vegetable stews and learning more about West African cuisine. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Savory Green Quiches

In my continuing quest to introduce a high volume of greens into my breakfasts, I came up with a variation on the kuku sabzi theme: little quiches baked in a muffin pan. The ingredients are malleable and fungible, and you can basically do whatever you like with this, as long as you keep the ratio of flour to milk stable. You should feel free to pack as many greens and spices as you can. The thing loses some of its flavor in baking, kind of like bean-based meatballs, so you can really add as much flavor as you like. The more kala namak salt you put in, the eggier it will feel.

1 package (approx. 200g) baby spinach

6 big kale leaves

4 broccolini stems

2 tbsp chopped onion

3 garlic cloves

1/2 cup garbanzo/besan flour

1/2 cup Oatly Barista or other unsweetened plant milk

4 tbsp nutritional yeast

3 heaping tbsp Aglio Olio spice mix, or any similar seasoning

1 tbsp OMG, or similar seasoning

1 heaping tbsp kala namak

3 tbsp vegan parmesan, or a mix of ground nuts, hemp seeds, and nutritional yeast

Chop up the leaves a bit and put in food processor; process into tiny bits. Add all other ingredients except the vegan parmesan and process to a chunky texture. Spoon into muffin pan (you’ll have enough mixture for approximately 6 holes.) Sprinkle a little parmesan or nut mix on each quiche and press lightly with your fingers. Bake at 350 degrees for about 35 mins, or until a pick or fork comes out dry.

Veggie Sushi

I was going to write a post about the latest Plata hearing, vaccines, and the sad stories that the Davis Vanguard has been uncovering (great journalistic job, guys!) but my heart is heavy, so we rallied our spirits by having family sushi-making night. I only wish we could share the tray with everyone we are in communication with, including families, currently incarcerated folks, formerly incarcerated folks, frontline health workers… after all ***this*** (insert expansive hand motion here) is over, perhaps we can all get together as a community for a potluck?

In the meantime, I’m extending all of you an invitation to our upcoming symposium about mass incarceration and the COVID-19 crisis. Attendance is free, but you do have to register to participate. And hey, we give MCLE credits!

Re the sushi: it’s pretty easy if you have the right ingredients on hand. Here’s what I use:

  • 2 cups Sukoyaka Genmai (the best gently milled brown rice, which the wonderful Tanaka Sensei introduced our family to)
  • 4 tbsp mirin
  • 1 tbsp vegan furikake (we have some but you can make your own)
  • 1 cucumber
  • 1 carrot
  • 3-inch cube of butternut squash
  • 1 avocado
  • 1/4 block of Hodo Soy tofu
  • 1 package nori sheets
  • sushi rolling mats
  • saran wrap

Cook rice in instant pot or rice cooker. Get out of cooker, let cool to room temperature, then mix with mirin and furikake.

While rice is cooking, slice vegetables into very thin matchsticks. The butternut squash can be cut thinly and then baked until soft.

Place a bowl with tap water near the rice, veg, and sushi mat. Cover the sushi mat with a piece of saran wrap, then put a nori sheet on top. Moisten you hands in the water bowl; take a few big spoonfuls of rice and layer them, patting them down on the nori (1/4-inch thickness) and leaving about 2 inches at the end. Then, toward the beginning, place the vegetable sticks of your choice.

There are lots of tutorials on how to roll sushi–anyone will do. The lesson I learned was not to overfill. Use some water on a fingertip to seal.

Take your best knife, moisten it with tap water, and resolutely slice up the roll into little maki sushi (each about an inch long.) Sprinkle furikake or black sesame if desired. Enjoy!

Kuku Sabzi

In my continuing mission to introduce more greens into my breakfasts (previous attempts included lots of smoothie bowls) I came up with a wonderful solution that can be made ahead and provide convenient, protein- and nutrient-rich breakfasts for the whole week. Kuku Sabzi is a Persian dish of dense greens and herbs bound with egg. My version substitutes the egg with chickpea flour, plant milk, and olive oil, and incorporates lots of herbs and spices. You can make lots of variations, depending on the greens you have on hand. This version uses Stonehouse spice mixes, which I find incredibly useful.

Ingredients:

  • 8 big collard leaves
  • 8 big kale leaves
  • 100g or so of spinach or baby spinach
  • 1/2 cup parsley
  • 1/2 cup cilantro
  • 1/2 cup chickpea flour
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened plant milk
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 heaping tbsp OMG (or your own combination of onion powder, garlic powder, and salt)
  • 1 heaping tbsp Aglio Olio (or your own Italian seasoning)

Process:

First, remove the stems from the collards and kale and tear into pieces. Place all the greens and herbs in your food processor and chop into tiny pieces–you may need to do this in batches.

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Lightly oil a shallow, rectangular baking dish (I use this 9”x12” one, but anything will do) and line with parchment (don’t forget the parchment–this will pay off dividends at the end.)

Next, place all the chopped greens in a bowl. In a separate bowl, mix the chickpea flour, plant milk, olive oil, and spices, into an eggy-textured mixture. Transfer the mixture into the bowl with the greens and mix well with your hands, until the mixture binds the greens together. Then, transfer the lot into the baking dish. Using damp hands, push the mixture into the bottom of the dish, until it is very dense and covers the whole dish. Flatten the top.

Bake for about 45 mins, or until the kuku has solidified. Remove from oven, lift using the parchment, and gently place on a cooling rack. After it cools a bit, you can cut it into squares, triangles, or any other shape, and store in the fridge. This is delicious when eaten cold, straight from the fridge, or dipped into this fabulous dressing.

Vegan Sabih

Sabih, the sensational eggplant/egg/tahini/amba sandwich, is a mainstay in Israel, and there’s even a place that serves it in Oakland. It’s easy to make at home whenever you like if you have the main ingredients on hand. Here’s a vegan version:

  • 2 pitot (we make our own sourdough pitot, recipe some other time)
  • 1 eggplant
  • 4-5 cloves garlic
  • salt
  • 1/2 package firm or medium-firm tofu
  • 1 tsp kala namak salt
  • 1 tbsp chickpea flour
  • 1 tbsp plant milk
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1 tsp amba powder
  • 2 tbsp raw tahini
  • juice from 2 lemons
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, green onions, parsley, thinly sliced

Heat up the oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Slice the eggplant into 1/2-inch rounds. Place on silicone baking sheet and top with minced garlic and salt.

Slice the tofu into very thin slices. Make a mixture out of the kala namak, chickpea flour, plant milk, and turmeric. Coat each tofu slice in the mixture on both sides. Place on silicone baking sheet alongside the eggplant. Bake for about 20 minutes.

While the eggplant and tofu are baking, mix the amba powder with some boiling water to make a bit of amba. Mix the tahini with lemon juice and garlic to make a bit of tahini. Slice all veg and herbs thinly.

Halve the pitot and toast them (if you like). Smear tahini and amba inside each pocket. Pack the pita full of tofu, eggplant, and vegetables. Serve alongside a nice salad with some mint tea.

Vegan Sourdough Mincemeat Babka

In case you are looking for more ways to grow as sourdough bakers, I highly recommend this fantastic cake. My mom used to buy cakes like this, leavened with commercial yeast and stuffed with chocolate and cinnamon, and serve me a slice for breakfast with tea; those were very tasty, but this one is so much better.

The prep time is long, but most of it is the bacteria working for you (including an overnight stay in the fridge), so it’s not particularly labor intensive, and the cutting and braiding process is a fun skill to acquire. I veganized and modified Maurizio’s excellent recipe in the following ways:

  • Substitute oat milk for milk (same amounts);
  • Substitute oat butter (Miyoko’s) for the butter (same amounts);
  • Substitute Hampton Creek’s Just Egg for the egg (including the egg wash! easy to do, as Maurizio gives the egg amount by weight)
  • Substitute brown sugar for the caster sugar in the cake;
  • substitute agave syrup for the caster sugar in the simple syrup (I did a 1:1 substitution);
  • use mincemeat for the filling (many jars are made with vegan suet substitutes).

For people making this for the first time, do not be dismayed if the dough is very sticky (a function of the butter and the Just Egg.) After the night stay in the fridge it will be far more workable. Lightly flour your bench before rolling it out. Also, I don’t have a pullman pan, but I baked this very successfully in a silicone loaf pan, and it popped out just fine.

Image

The result was fantastic. You can hardly detect sourness from the sourdough, but the texture is so rewarding. The brioche texture is fluffy and rich, the filling sweet and spicy, and the slices are gorgeous. Happy 2021 to all!

Grilled Eggplants Stuffed with Impossible Meat and Pomegranate

For today’s Christmas Eve brunch, we made a version of Oz Telem’s new recipe. I think ours benefits from the fact that the eggplants were grilled, and from some little tweaks to the recipe. Because I grew up not far from where Jesus spent his childhood, I imagine he had lots of fresh grilled vegetables (not eggplant, though) but he and his family probably ate lots of fish rather than vegan meats. We used Impossible meat, but you could use Beyond Beef as well.

Ingredients

  • Two medium-sized lightweight eggplants
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • 1/2 onion, chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 tsp baharat
  • 1/2 package Impossible/Beyond ground
  • 1 tbsp pine nuts
  • 1 large pomegranate
  • parsley for garnish

process

Fire up the grill. Gently peel the eggplants in a zebra pattern – removing lengthwise stripes of peel, but keeping some stripes on, so that the eggplant retains its shape. Place on the grill and grill for about 15 mins, taking care to char on all sides.

While the eggplant is grilling, cut the pomegranate in half; juice one half and extract the seeds from the other half (save those for later). Heat up the olive oil in a pan. Add the onions and cook until translucent. After 2-3 minutes, add the garlic and pine nuts. Cook for about 30 seconds. Then, add the Impossible/Beyond, the pomegranate juice, and the baharat. Sauté until the ground feels cooked and the spices are incorporated throughout (about 4-5 mins.)

Make a slit in each eggplant and stuff each one with half of the Impossible/Beyond mixture (it’ll be easy to fill, because the insides of the eggplant should be already fairly mushy.) Cook for another 10 mins or so on the grill, until the flavors incorporate. Sprinkle pomegranate seeds and parsley on top and serve with tchina (“tahini”) and other grilled vegetables. Happy Holidays!

The blog has been an effort to integrate works of compassion from three areas of my life–compassionate work, compassionate mindfulness, and compassionate cooking–so I hope the occasional recipe/mindfulness practice is not too surprising to the many folks reading here because of the COVID-19 crisis in prisons. We are thinking of those of you behind bars, and of those of you missing your incarcerated loved ones, and we hope you will soon get to cook and break bread together on the outside.

Hōjicha Latte

Let’s take a wee break from all criminal justice/civil rights aspects of this annus horribilis to discuss one of the upshots: given the closure of cafés, which are my favorite places to work, I’ve developed home barista skills. Usually I drink a matcha latte every day, but I’m out of matcha powder–and imagine my joy when I discovered that it is possible to make lattes from hōjicha! Hōjicha is a Japanese green tea, which obtains its distinctive flavor through roasting in a porcelain pot over charcoal (most other Japanese teas are steamed.) The tea is fired at a high temperature, altering the leaf color tints from green to reddish brown. One of the wonderful attributes of hōjicha is that it has almost no caffeine, which means I can happily drink a couple of these a day and serve this to my preschooler.

Simply grinding tea leaves does not make powder that is usable in lattes; matcha powder can be used in this way because of its distinctive processing. Thankfully, the good folks over at Stonemill Matcha sell hōjicha powder. To make this at home, you’ll need a tall glass, a little cup, a matcha whisk (chasen) and an ordinary kitchen whisk.

Pour about 1 cup of Oatly (or any plant milk, but if you have Oatly, why drink anything else?) into the tall glass and add a few ice cubes. Place the kitchen whisk in the glass and spin fast back and forth until you have a nice layer of foam on top. In the little cup, place a teaspoon of hōjicha powder. Add about 3-4 tbsp boiling water. Whisk with matcha whisk until a bit foamy. Carefully pour the hōjicha into the milk glass, which will create the layers you see in the picture. Enjoy!

Thai-Inspired Cauliflower Salad

It feels a bit frivolous to post about food while all this (imagine an expansive, all-inclusive gesture accompanying the word “this”) is going on, but everyone’s gotta eat, and if you’re thinking of lunch, why not have this fantastic salad? It comes together quickly and easily and is a vegan version of the Thai Larb salad. This recipe is a modification of Oz Telem’s recipe from his wonderful Cauliflower book.

  • 1 small cauliflower
  • 1 big handful each of: cilantro, parsley, green onion, basil, finely chopped
  • juice from 1 lime
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • 1 tsp minced ginger
  • 1 1/2 tbsp tamari or nama shoyu
  • optional: 1 tbsp vegan bacon (tempeh, eggplant, whatever you have on hand), finely chopped.

Cut cauliflower into florets, then place in food processor. Process to couscous consistency. Mix in a bowl with herbs. Add lime, garlic, ginger, and nama shoyu, and if you have it, some of the vegan bacon.

Uncomfortable Telling your Child that Meat Comes from Animals? Don’t Eat Animals

I try to be patient with the travails of parenting. Trust me, I have plenty of my own. But massive hypocrisies get my last nerve. See this parenting column from Slate:

Our sweet, funny, VERY sensitive just-turned 4-year-old daughter loves animals—and is right on the verge of figuring out where the meat we eat comes from. To be clear, we have never deliberately hidden this from her, but she has never expressly asked about it, and there’s no good way to randomly segue into “By the way, your dinner used to be alive.” She avoids eating chicken and turkey, and we’ve realized this might be because they’re called “chicken” and “turkey.” She does eat (with great joy) meats that don’t have the same name as their source animals, such as bacon, steak, and pot roast, but it’s clear from her comments that she doesn’t have a lock on what they’re made of. (“Dad, wouldn’t it be funny if bacon came from a pig like the ones that oink?!”) At some point soon, the jig will surely be up, and it is not unlikely there will be a lot of tears, some deep existential horror, and feelings of betrayal directed at us. If that’s the case, she’s also going to feel sad and mad about her conflicting feelings about whether to eat some of her favorite foods or not. How can we address this honestly while minimizing her distress? It seems like we should be preemptive about it, but how do we bring it up? For the record, we will tell her about vegetarianism and would be happy to stop feeding her meat if she asked (while ensuring that she gets enough protein and other nutrients, of course). We also do make an effort to purchase cruelty-free meat whenever possible, but I’m not sure that “Hey, the pig had a pretty nice life until someone killed it so we could have it for breakfast” is going to impress her.

And see the “great” advice to facilitate the hypocrisy:

I know I don’t have to tell you not to dismiss her feelings when she discovers the truth about her meals. I do urge you to be truthful with her about how you feel about eating meat. I think being honest with our kids, always, is foundational to being good parents.

The bottom line, though, is that you can’t really minimize her distress, and, as much as we want to protect our children from pain and sorrow and conflict, we shouldn’t protect them from all pain and sorrow and conflict. If we do, they’ll never learn the coping skills all people must develop to deal with these feelings. The best thing you can do is sympathize with her and be supportive. If she tells you she is going to be a vegetarian from now on, talk to her about how you’ll have to make sure her nutritional needs are met by finding other sources of protein that she likes eating. (This could be a fun project, trying new foods and cooking together. I know it was for us.) Your job as a loving parent in this situation, I believe, is to support her decision, whether it lasts a few days, weeks, years, or forever.

I remember this coming up, with some nervous chuckles, in parenting groups I attended when Rio was little: people embarrassed when their kids pointed out to them that they use the same word for the nuggets they are served and for the cute farm animal (“chicken.”) A breathtaking variant is the person who doesn’t like the animals on their plate to look like what they are, which is animals.

Conflicted? Embarrassed? Giggling about your own hypocrisy? Facing your child’s tears upon learning that you are participating in something horrific for animals and for the planet? Go no further! I have some advice to offer you, offered in all caps for those who need special clarity:

IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE SHARING WITH YOUR CHILDREN THAT MEAT COMES FROM ANIMALS, DON’T EAT ANIMALS.

IF YOU FEAR YOUR CHILD WILL BE DISTRESSED WHEN THEY LEARN THAT THEY ARE EATING ANIMALS, DON’T FEED THEM ANIMALS.

IF IT EMBARRASSES YOU TO TELL YOUR CHILD “HOW YOU FEEL” ABOUT EATING ANIMALS, STOP EATING THEM, AND THEN YOU’LL FEEL FINE.

IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOUR CHILD ABOUT EATING ANIMALS, DON’T EAT THEM, AND THEN TELL THEM WHAT I TELL MY SON: “ANIMALS ARE OUR FRIENDS AND WE DON’T EAT OUR FRIENDS.”

That’s fucking it.

A few recommendations for books to read with your child:

Essential viewing for you:

Also, enough already with the fucking protein. It’s not the struggle/challenge that people make it out to be. Kids need 1-1.5 g protein for every 2 lbs of weight. If you feed them good food, they are getting enough protein. Kids all over the world happily eat beans and tofu and their parents don’t fret about protein. Why don’t the animal eaters ever ask themselves about vitamins and fiber?

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.