Wednesday, October 20, 2010

A Holiday Salad to Remember: Cranberry-Orange-Avocado with Maple-Glazed Walnuts


This past winter, I was part of a 3-month, residential, personal development program for young adults.  One component of the program involved cooking for one another.  We were split into cooking groups, and each group was responsible for two meals over the three months.  My cooking group lucked into cooking Easter dinner, and decided, in order to accommodate all the food restrictions in our group, to cook a gluten-free, vegan meal.

The cornerstone of our main course was my rice dressing recipe, but we still needed a couple of veggie dishes.  We ended up opting for glazed carrots, and this salad recipe, which was recommended by one of my other group members.  The recipe features mandarin oranges, glazed walnuts, craisins, avocado, and blue cheese (which we decided to omit, since half our cooking group had dairy allergies).  I expected the salad would be tasty, but I was shocked how amazingly it turned out.  It was completely devoured, and even people in our group who hated walnuts with a fiery passion went back for seconds and thirds.

The Key to a Good Salad: Some Glazed Nuts, and a Killer Dressing

I want to share one of my secrets to sounding like a much fancier cook than I am: glazed nuts.  Have you ever gone to a restaurant and seen a salad served with "maple-glazed pecans" or "honey-glazed walnuts"?  Sweet, maybe a little spicy, with an aura of gourmet - not bad for a garnish or a salad topping.  Well, guess what: they are also one of the easiest things ever to make.  Glazed nuts are one of my go-to desserts, because I feel less guilty eating a lot of sugar if that sugar is wrapped around some protein.  They're also an easy snack food, and, most importantly, they make for one damn fancy-sounding salad.

But what is a salad without the dressing?  I am constantly frustrated by store-bought dressings.  Almost all of them feature dairy, or eggs, or soy products, or beet juice (all-natural colouring!)  Some salad dressings that have absolutely no need for dairy (such as honey-mustard) still use milk ingredients for flavour!  It's infuriating.  Luckily, years ago a family friend (who also happens to be a personal chef) taught me the key to a good dressing, and now I would like to pass it along to you.

So keep reading to find out my two secrets to an amazing salad.  Once you have a dressing, and some fancy nuts, the rest is easy!  Wash and shred some lettuce; or, if you're like me, and hate the salad spinner with a fiery passion, invest in one of the bags or boxes of pre-washed salad greens.  Chop up whatever veggies or fruit you happen to have on hand.  (May I suggest roasted red pepper, tomato, and strawberry?  Or avocado and black bean with some chopped tortilla chips on top?  Or some kiwi fruit and celery?  Honestly, whatever you have on hand works; and you can adjust your dressing recipe to match!)  Then pour on the dressing, top with some nuts, and enjoy!

The Best Rice Dish ever (And It Just Happens to Make a Wonderful Holiday Dressing, Too!)

In my Thanksgiving post, I mentioned that my parents have been celebrating the three major turkey holidays* (i.e. Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving) with the same group of friends since well before I was born.  Over the 25 years or so this tradition has been running, some recipes have been developed, perfected, and cemented in tradition.  One of those includes a brown-and-wild rice stuffing that my dad's friend developed years and years and years ago.  Many of the regulars at our holiday dinners are wheat-sensitive, so a long while ago it was decided that a rice alternative to a traditional bread stuffing would be a good move.

*My family and our friends tend to not eat a lot of red meat.  So while I realize ham or lamb are often traditional for Easter, our family definitely goes for turkey instead.  And pumpkin pie is served at all three holidays, because it's just that good!

While this dish found its origins in a turkey stuffing, it goes well and beyond just a holiday side dish.  Full of nuts and fruit, it has enough bulk and protein to be the main dish at a holiday dinner (and I've certainly used it as such, to great acclaim), and enough sweetness to make a killer breakfast food.  A chef-to-be friend of mine has developed a rice-cooker version, using slightly fewer holiday-specific spices, and she uses this recipe as a side dish all year round.

I've tried to stay true to the original spirit of the dish, while also modifying it to be fully vegan and gluten-free.  And being me, I've upped all the flavour notes just a bit.

A Much-Belated Thanksgiving Post

Turkey
This year's Thanksgiving was a momentous one, for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was the first year ever that I haven't made it to my family's traditional Thanksgiving Dinner.  My parents are part of what they call "orphans holidays" - three couples and their kids who don't have extended family in the area, and who celebrate Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas together every year.  This tradition predates me (the oldest of the kids), and it's become such a well-oiled, perfect machine that we barely have to think about it every year.  The food is almost always the same (the veggies change up a bit, and occasionally we add a seasonal dessert), and while we occasionally invite other "orphan" friends in need of a place to go for the holidays, the core people are also pretty unchanging.  So I was a little sad when I ended up having to work on the Sunday evening and missed out on the traditional family dinner.
Stuffing, salad, potatoes with gravy, and yams

But everything was alright!  Because from the moment my roommates and I moved into our epic new house, I knew that I wanted to host Thanksgiving Dinner here.  I love to cook for people, and I enjoy entertaining; and now I finally lived in a house big enough to do both!  And two of my roommates hail from different provinces and don't have family to celebrate with, so we wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to celebrate Thanksgiving.  So we invited a bunch of close mutual friends, and then all of us went about making our own traditional Thanksgiving dishes, taken from our years of family celebrations.  In the end, it was a wonderful celebration with good food and great people; and we all got a chance to honour our own Thanksgiving histories while also moving forward.  I felt so incredibly grown up cooking and hosting my OWN Thanksgiving Dinner, with the close people in MY life - somehow, knowing I was capable of putting a holiday dinner on the table proved to me that I really can handle some of the big changes in my life.

Pumpkin apple soup
And the best part?  How low-stress we all were!  We started cooking on the Friday, and by Saturday afternoon (dinner was Saturday evening) we were taking naps, relaxing, leisurely getting ready, and enjoying some fine cheeses.  Our washing machine overflowed, a couple of glasses got broken, and our coffee machine exploded; and yet, beyond a couple of harried 5 minute intervals, everyone was calm and having a good time.  I call that the true measure of holiday success!


Apple pie

The Menu
Appetizer: five kinds of fancy cheese, exotic crackers, and some red pepper jelly
Soup course: Pumpkin-apple spice soup!!!
Dinner: turkey, brown rice dressing*, baked yams, garlic mashed potatoes*, gravy (turkey or vegan*), succotash, cranberry-orange salad*
Dessert: apple pie, vegan-gluten free pumpkin pie* (both homemade, of course!)

All the starred recipes were the ones I had a hand in, and I'll address them in other posts to follow.  And I hope that all of you had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving dinner yourself!

Friday, October 8, 2010

Kitchenprovisation (Or, the Joys of Quinoa)

Quinoa (pronounced KIN-wah, not kwe-NO-a) is probably my favourite grain at the moment, and has been for awhile.  Why, you ask? Well, for starters, quinoa is a complete protein, which means that it contains all the essential amino acids in the right proportions for our bodies to use them.  This doesn't mean that quinoa alone is a sufficient source of protein; but it certainly doesn't hurt, given my occasionally protein-challenged diet, if my carbohydrate component is also building up my protein intake.  (Most whole grains, however, do contain a lot of protein - they just may not all contain all of the essential amino acids in a single type of grain).  More practically, quinoa is just faster to make than rice, given I only cook with whole grain rice.  Whole grain rice takes 40-50 minutes to cook, while quinoa takes 15.  And finally, and probably most importantly, quinoa just works in everything!  It's extremely delicious plain, as a side (especially when made with veggie broth instead of water), it's great in salads (a Mexican black-bean salad with quinoa is on my to-do list to try), and it can replace couscous or bulgar wheat in salads like tabbouleh.

And, my favourite application, it's absolutely brilliant when mixed with a tomato sauce.  During the year or so that I'd tired of soba noodles, but hadn't yet discovered amazing brown rice pasta, quinoa was how I got my fix of delicious veggie tomato sauces.  I've made tomato quinoa with shrimp, with black beans, and with chickpeas.  And like most pasta dishes, it's the easiest recipe to make up on the spot.  At its simplest, mix some cooked quinoa with jarred marinara sauce, and enjoy.  But sometimes I like to make my own tomato sauce, which is what I did this week.

My inspiration came from an eggplant.  I was grocery shopping with my roommates when I spotted a GIANT globe eggplant.  I don't eat eggplant very often, but I really like it.  My friend (who's vegan) and I have had conversations about how eggplant can take on the flavour of so many different "forbidden foods" to us, although most people who can still eat those foods will probably thing it's nothing like.  (An example: one of the Thai restaurants in Vancouver I frequent adds eggplant to their green curry.  I swear that eggplant tastes like the elephant ear doughnuts they have at the PNE, although I couldn't tell you why.)  So I decided it was time to experiment with eggplant again.  The next morning, I got up, opened my fridge and cupboards, and started concocting a sauce.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Macaroni Cheese Redux

Whenever I try a radically new recipe, I generally make it exactly as written, just to master the technique.  Once I know how to make something, though, watch out - if I have confidence I can make the final product, that's about all I need to start radical experimentation.  So even though I've already talked about gluten-free Mac'n'Cheese, I felt it warranted a second post, because really, that first attempt was just a proof-of-principle.  This second, unbelievably delicious, attempt, however, is the recipe with my own spin, and it's rapidly becoming my new favourite food!  I would definitely entertain with this dish, although that would mean having to share it...

Anyway, as I've indicated before, mac'n'cheese was a dish that I loved to modify back when I could still eat cheese.  I figured many of these modifications would still apply, and indeed, this dish turned out pretty much perfectly.