Korean Vegetable Pancake

You'll be pleased to know I'm still cooking (and eating). This is something I made recently.

Why Korean vegetable pancakes? Well... sometime in the spring I'd had a vegetable pancake for the first time. Later, I looked up the recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian - read all the steps, noted the ingredients and then did nothing with that knowledge. Then three weeks ago, I came across some garlic scapes at my favourite stall in the farmer's market and my brain was kind enough to make the connection.

Okay, it's been awhile... I blame the intranet and my two week lack of cooking. The other couple of weeks were probably just laziness.

Anyways, in the spirit of not being lazy, I have compiled a few short lists:

Foods I'd like to make for the first time:

• Fondant
• Homemade tofu
• Mini bagels
• Cinnamon rolls
• Crumpets
• Lasagna

Ingredients I'd like to use for the first time:

• Artichokes
• Fresh coconut
• Japanese eggplant
• Israeli couscous
• Gigantes beans

And just because I always have trouble remembering this list..

Five foods I do not like:

• Peas*
• Lima beans
• Passionfruit* 
• Pickled ginger
• Blue cheese

* These are tolerable.

I don't know why I don't like pickled ginger since I like it in every other form, but so it goes.

I Love... Baked Oatmeal

Once upon a time (a few years ago) my housemates and I would host Sunday breakfast potlucks. So for a while I used to make my specialty - baked oatmeal - on a regular basis. 

Then somehow I forgot all about it until one of the housemates e-mailed me a couple weeks ago to say that she was eating my baked oatmeal all the time. I didn't even have the recipe anymore. This appalled her, so she e-mailed it to me right away:

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Baked Oatmeal

one banana, mashed

two eggs

three cups of oatmeal

1/2 tsp baking powder

one cup milk

brown sugar or maple syrup

spices

a chopped apple

in a bowl combine the banana, eggs and oatmeal. mix in the milk, spices and sweeteners desires. add chopped apple [if you like]. bake at 350 for about twenty five minutes.

best served on cold mornings in shallow bowls when made by a roommate.

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So that's all there is to it! Meaghan says that she's modified the recipe a bit - she uses one egg instead of two, and two apples instead of one. She also uses rice milk, and throws in some psyllium fibre and millet for extra binding power.

When I made this again I omitted the eggs entirely and uses "chia eggs" instead. I would have used psyllium too, but I was having a senile moment. Anyways, it makes a fabulous breakfast or snack food.

Falafel Burger with Taratour Sauce

In an attempt to make a burger that was both "fake and fancy" I settled on the falafel burgers from Rebar.

However, there were a number of setbacks:

• I forgot to buy chickpeas when I went to the grocery store. Without chickpeas, these would be breadcrumbs, tahini, onions and spices. So I had to go back.
• The recipe says to roast bulghur and then grind it into a powder in your spice grinder. Apparently me and my mortar and pestle are not as powerful as an electronic device(!).
• I was lacking breadcrumbs so I crossed my fingers and used one cup instead of two.

In spite of these mishaps, the burgers turned out great. So did the taratour sauce. What I gathered from Wikipedia is that taratour is a Turkish word that means "has tahini in it" - which this sauce does - plus miso and chipotle and lemon juice, making it a great topping.

Mochi (aka Daifuku?)

I don't even know where to start with mochi... how about I've had four today? Or that they are really easy to make (you use the microwave!) and that they can be filled with red bean paste (one of my favourite foods!).

They're a not-too-sweet dessert made from glutinous rice flour (which is actually still gluten free - glutinous here just means sticky) which is wrapped around whatever filling you want: berries, red or white bean paste, even ice cream, apparently.

I made my bean paste from scratch, but after that they take about 15 minutes to make. Get the recipe from vegan yum yum.

I Love... Kale Chips

I've known about kale chips for a while now, but I've never made them. Then a blog post called A Tale of Kale reminded me again of what I might be missing out on.

In less than 15 minutes, I had a big bowlful of crispy kale, lightly flavoured with olive oil and French sea salt.

Last week I was convinced that coconut can replace bacon. Now this week, I'm surprised to admit that kale chips could replace potato chips. They have the same satisfying crunch and salty taste, I swear!

Aux Vivres, Montreal

After reading a blog article titled Montreal Vegan Throwndown: Aux Vivres vs. Crudessence, I was excited to try both vegan restaurants. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that there are two different locations for 105 Rachel St.: the West side and the East side. I ended up on the wrong side, of course, staring confusedly at a plain blue door that didn't seem to lead anywhere, particularly not to delicious vegan food.

However, with a bit of backtracking, I was close enough to Aux Vivres. Once I arrived, I discovered that dining in wasn't an option - even the take-out area was crammed. I waited patiently for my chapati wrap though - the BLT.

It's obviously a misnomer. There's no bacon, of course. If they wanted to be accurate, they would call it a NCLT, or le noix de coco, laitue et tomate (aka coconut, lettuce and tomato).

Coconut? Yeah, that's what I thought... and that's why I ordered it. Thankfully it works and actually tastes pretty authentic (although I'm sure bacon fanatics would laugh at the thought).