Giant zucchini are good for things other than dirty jokes.

Summer is rolling along, and we are getting close to that time of year when every back yard garden and farmer's market will be full of zucchini and summer squash, some of which will be monstrous in size. These monster zucchinis were one of my favorite things when I was a kid. Part of that is because I always love eating zucchini, part of that is because a zucchini the size of a baseball bat is really cool looking, and mostly it is because my grandmother uses those huge zukes to make stuffed zucchini, which is just delicious.

A few years ago, my friends and I stumbled across some of these giant zukes at a farmers market for like a dollar a piece. I immediately ran up and grabbed one shouting, "Yo, let's stuff these mother fuckers." none of my friends had any clue what I was talking about, other than the ones that thought I was making a dirty joke. I guess I had assumed that since my grandmother made them, and they were so delicious, that everyone would make stuffed zucchini. I appear to have been wrong. My friend Pete did say that it sounded similar to a Middle Eastern dish, but I can't remember the name of it.

That day, I made it my mission to work out a vegan version of my grandma's stuffed zucchini, that I loved so much. It took a couple of shots, but I like to think that I now have it pretty much nailed. My grandmother's original version was basically sweet Italian sausage, tomatoes, and rice, topped with melted cheese and bread crumbs. I have found that you can match that pretty closely using TVP, seitan or veggie burger crumbles, with the right spices. I use TVP because it is getting really easy to find(you can get it at most grocery stores now) and it is pretty cheap. The cheese and breadcrumb topping is not essential, but is damned tasty, so if you have a hard time finding either of them vegan, just leave em out, and you will still have a fine meal.

p.s. This recipe makes like 15 servings, so make it for a party, or be prepared to eat it for a week. Either way it is tasty enough to be a success. You can cut the recipe in half and use smaller zucchinis, but I prefer the giant zukes. There isn't really a taste difference in the zucchini, but the ratio of stuffing to zuke is better balanced in the larger guys.

Grandma Davies' Stuffed Giant Zucchini (veganized)

Ingredients
1 - Gigantic zucchini (zukes about a foot and a half long and as big around as a softball are ideal)
2 cups - short grain rice (cooked as per the instructions on the package)
1 - 28 oz. can peeled chopped plum tomatoes, drained (I would save the liquid for veggie stock)
1 1/2 cups - Re-hydrated TVP crumbles (or 2 cups thawed frozen veggie burger crumbles)
1 - med onion, minced
10 oz. - Vegan Mozzarella, shredded (my favorites are Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet and Chicago Soy Dairy Teese)
1/4 cup vegan bread crumbs
6 - cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp - Thyme
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp rosemary leaves
1/2 tbsp fennel seeds
1/2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp - cooking oil

Equipment
2 - med sauce pots
1 - large cookie sheet
1 - large salad bowl
1 - food processor or blender (non-essential)
knife, cutting board, etc...

Cooking

• In a medium sauce pot, prepare the rice as per the directions on the package.
• Put the onions, garlic, salt and oil in the other sauce pot over medium heat, stirring frequently.
• In your blender or food processor pulse all of the spices until they are roughly broken up. If you don't have a blender or processor, just put the spices on your cutting board and chop them with a chefs knife. It will work just fine but take a lot longer.
• Once the onions become translucent add the spices and continue to sautee for about a minute.
  
• Add the TVP (or veggie burger) and tomatoes and continue to stir frequently until it comes to a boil. (This by it's self is an awesome pasta sauce.)
• Once the rice is finished, combine the rice and sauce in your salad bowl and set aside to cool.
• Cut your monster zuke in half length wise and trim the ends just enough to remove the stem spot. Be careful with your trimming, because we need to preserve the integrity of the vessel.
• Using a large spoon, scoop out all the seeds and guts. I would say that you should save this for stock or compost, but it is worthless in stock, and will turn your compost into a zucchini farm, so you should just get rid of it.
• Use a fork to poke a bunch of holes all over the inside and outside of the zucchini pieces.
• Rub the outside of the zucchini with a little oil and arrange the two halves on the cookie sheet.
• If the zucchini halves are unstable, use wadded up tinfoil to steady them.
• The filling doesn't have to be all the way down to room temperature before you stuff, but you should let it cool enough to thicken up well. This will make it easier to create a nice mound.
• Stuff each side with enough filling to make a mound about and inch and a half above the top of the vessel. (You will probably have a little leftover, maybe more depending on your zuke size. You can just eat it by it's self, or it freezes pretty well, and can be used to stuff peppers, squash flowers (now that is a recipe I might have to blog soon!) or lots of other veggies.)
• Place the stuffed zukes into a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes, testing with a fork every few minutes after you pass the 10 minute mark. The cooking time is going to change a lot based on how cool the stuffing was and how thick the zuke walls are.
• Once the flesh is still firm, but you can poke into it without too much resistance, take them out and turn your oven up to broil, or the hottest setting it has.
• Give each side of the zuke a nice coating of soy cheese and then an even dusting of bread crumbs.
• Put the zukes back under the broiler and watch them closely until the cheese is nice and melty.
• Be careful because soy cheese doesn't like to melt, so your bread crumbs might start to over brown before the cheese looks really melted. If that is the case just go ahead and take them out, they will be perfect.

Alternate Version
Don't like fake meats? Try using 1 1/2 cups dry brown lentils, prepared as per the package's instructions, in place of the TVP. It will still taste great, the rice/legume combo is a great source of protein, and it will make this dish totally gluten free.

The Triumphant Return, see also: ArtieKGB Triumphs over Laziness and Procrastination, see also: Hell Yes, Chili!

So, no excuses offered. I just kind of dropped the ball mid way through my Cinco De Mayo project. I was trying to go back to that, but it is pretty out of date at this point, so I am just going to move on. Trust me, I love Mexican food enough, that I am definitely going to circle back around.

Today, I want to talk about Chili. I absolutely adore a nice hot (temp and spice) bowl of chili. I would suppose you can lump this in with one of ArtieKGB's tenets of cooking, "Tomato + garlic + fat + salt = delicious." There are no doubts about it though (unless you are a crazy person) chili is delicious.

I have been playing with my chili recipe for a few years, and it definitely caters to my preferences as far as flavors. In addition to my already stated tomato+garlic+fat fixation, I am also a huge fan of spicy food, and all things roasted and caramelized. This recipe works all of these things into one great pot of awesome. If you are lazy and in a hurry, you can skip or change a lot of the steps, but in the end, your chili will be no where near as good.


Chili the way Artie likes it

Ingredients

1 - 19oz can red kidney beans
2 - 19oz cans crushed tomatoes
Seranno peppers to taste, finely minced (I use 10, but I like things really spicy)
5 - cloves garlic, finely minced
1 - med yellow onion chopped
2 - zucchini cut in 1/2 inch cubes
2 - large carrots cut in 1/2 slices
1 - ear corn on the cob
1 - large bell pepper chopped
vegetable oil
1 tbsp - Salt
2 - tbsp table sugar
1 tbsp - ground cumin
2 tsps - ground oregano

Equipment

1 - large sauce or stock pot
1 - cookie sheet
knife, cutting board, etc.


Cooking

• · Cut all the corn off of the cob and spread the corn and chopped bell pepper on a cookie sheet.
• · Put the cookie sheet under a broiler and watch closely until the veggies begin to blacken. You want some solid roasting, but don't make charcoal.
• · After removing from the broiler, set the corn and peppers aside to cool.
• · Put the onions, garlic, serranos, oil and salt in a large sauce pan, over medium high heat, and sautee until the onions become translucent.
• · Add the cumin and oregano and reduce the heat to med.
• · Continue to sautee, stirring regularly until the onions have cooked out all of their water and turn a nice golden to dark brown. Be careful not to let them burn.
  
• · Add the beans, zucchini, carrots, corn and bell peppers and a little more oil
  
• · Continue to sautee until the veggies begin to soften
• · Add the tomatoes and sugar
• · Allow the chili to come back to a simmer
• · Turn the heat down until the pot is just barely simmering
• · Stir regularly for the next 30 minutes to an hour.

The easy but not quite as tasty way

• · Sautee the onions, garlic, serranos until the onions are translucent
• · Combine all ingredients in a crock pot on medium low and leave it to cook while you are at work.

Usin' The Sauce.

Something you will notice in a hurry about most of those sauce recipes, is that they make a whole lot of sauce. The reason for that is simple, I freaking love any and all(vegan) tomato sauce. I suppose there are also some other reasons:

1. Sauce not only holds really well in the fridge, and for months in the freezer, but it is actually better a few days after you made it.
   
2. I often make a few pounds of pasta along with the sauce, and then portion that out into sandwich bags, and have work lunches (or lazy dinners) for the week.
3. In addition to being a great leftover in it's own right, sauce is a great ingredient. I often add it to other recipes to cut down on the cooking time that using fresh tomatoes would add.

It's reason number 3 that I am going to talk about today, and probably in my next post or two. What can I say, when I get Italian food on the brain, it is hard to think of anything else.

I hit snooze far too many times this morning, got ready in a hurry, stepped out the door to walk the dog and instantly realized that this is a soup day. The sky is gray and overcast, it is chilly but not freezing and there is a heavy mist in the air, that gets you wet but won't quite become rain. It is just the kind of day when I want to sit inside watch dvds and eat soup. I may have to go to work, so sitting on my couch and watching movies all day is out, but soup is definitely still on the radar for dinner. Since I still have a little sauce left from that batch that prompted the last entry and I always have veggie stock on hand, so I have got a pretty good head start on a pot of Pasta fagioli (say it with me, "Pasta Fah-zool.") This is easily my favorite soup ever.

Pasta Fagioli
Like a lot of other Italian dishes, if you asked a hundred different grandmas, you would get a hundred different recipes. The things that these recipes always share are small white beans and short cut pasta. Most recipes also include a tomato broth, but not all. Some also have other veggies mixed in. I make what is pretty much the standard version, Cannelinni Beans, Ditalini pasta and tomato broth.

Ingredients:
5 - cups of veggie stock
2 - cups of left over sauce (I like to use Fra Diavolo for this, but any will work.)
1 Tbsp - olive oil
3 - stalks of celery finely diced
1 - carrot finely diced
1 - small onion finely diced
1 - 15 fl oz can of Cannelinni Beans drained and rinsed
1/2 pound - dry Ditalini pasta

Equipment:
1 - large stock pot
1 - med soup pot
1 - strainer
knife, cutting board, etc...


Cooking:

• The first thing you need to do is make a decision, do you want to eat soup, or a thick pasta dish. If soup is what you are looking for, you should start by cooking the Ditalini according to the directions on the package and keep it separate. If you want a thick pasta dish, you can just add the pasta to the soup while it is cooking.
  
• Put your celery, carrots, onions and oil in the large pot over medium high heat. Saute until the onions and celery become translucent and the carrots soften.
• Add the beans, stock and sauce and turn the heat up to high.
  
• Stir regularly until the pot boils.
• If you are looking for soup (and already cooked your pasta) you are done. Just add the pasta to the pot and serve.
• If you are looking for a thicker pasta dish (and haven't cooked your pasta yet) add the raw pasta to the pot. Continue stirring regularly until the pasta is cooked through. This will soak up a lot of your broth and make a thicker stew like pasta dish.
  

Garbage Soup

My Grandma could cook you a 5 course tasting menu, using nothing but dust and cobwebs and you would swear it was made by an Iron Chef. I would imagine that this owes equally to being a child of the depression and then the single mother of a large family. Even though she became much more comfortable financially over the years, there are some habits that she never lost, primarily that the woman does not waste food. Now I don't just mean she eats her leftovers before they spoil, I mean she could give the Native Americans a run for their money with that every part of the Buffalo jazz. There is not a single scrap, clipping, bone, skin, or anything else goes unused in her home.

When I was a kid, I used to poke fun at some of her stranger habits. The one that I remember the most, is Garbage Soup. When making dinner, my grandmother always kept two salad bowls on the counter, one for meat scraps and one for veggie scraps. Everything that was trimmed off of either was saved in the respective salad bowl. I mean everything, cores, skins, stems, everything. When she was cleaning up, she would empty the bowls into matching gallon ziplock bags in her freezer. When these bags got full, she made what I jokingly called garbage soup.

As I have gotten older I have a lot more respect for the whole process. Basically, my grandmother was saving money by making her own veggie and meat stocks, from food that she had already paid for and most people would have just thrown away. This is a skill that she learned because between the depression and being a single mom, she never had any other option. Having grown up under much easier circumstances, skills like this are something that my generation (and those after it) for the most part totally lack. For most of us, that isn't a problem. We just go out and buy whatever we need to eat. Most people I know would not even buy veggie stock (let alone make it,) because that means actually cooking from scratch which is something that is becoming more and more rare in the age of box mixes, canned stew and microwave dinners. Everyone would really be doing themselves a service to try and learn to not only make meals from scratch, but to make ingredients from scratch. For vegans, I think that it is essential.
I am sure to revisit this topic in future posts, but today lets just talk about veggie stock (I obviously don't care to make meat stock.)

Home Made Veggie Stock
The recipe here is going to involve mainly just process instructions, since the ingredients just end up being whatever you have left over.

To start
Get yourself a big airtight container, to keep in the freezer. I usually just use a gallon size ziplock bag. Every time you cut up a vegetable put all your scraps in the freezer. I seriously save everything, from carrot peels to broccoli stems. I once accidentally saved a whole bunch of cerano chile cores and ginger scraps from a Thai meal. The resulting broth was so spicy and delicious, that I now make it a point to try and get some pepper cores and ginger into every batch. You might want to skip the pepper cores if you don't like spice, but it is important to try and get a variety of veggies in there. It will make your end product a lot tastier, and it is also a good way to remind yourself to eat a variety of veggies, which is super important if you don't want a vitamin deficiency.

Ingredients:
1 - gallon bag of vegetable scraps
A heck of a lot of water
salt and seasoning to taste

Equipment:
The largest sauce pot you have
A large open container, like another sauce pot or a big salad bowl
A pasta strainer
A Clean dish towel (paper towels don't work)

Cooking:

• Put all the scraps in your pot, and put it on your stove over high heat until boiling.
• The idea here, is to just let it boil away. Every time the liquid in the pot reduces by a quarter, fill it back up to the top. Keep doing this until the liquid in the pot is the color of a glass of iced tea, then remove it from the heat. (I like to use a ladle to pour some into a clear glass so I can peek at the color.) This will probably take a few hours.
  
• Once the pot cools, line the strainer with the clean dish towel, and pour the broth slowly through it, collecting the liquid in your large container.
• all of the solid veggie scraps should now be all gross and mushy. There is really no nutritional value left to them. Throw them in your trash or compost, or feed them to a pet.
• Put the liquid back in the pot and bring it back up to a simmer.
  
• This is when you are going to add your other flavors. I like to wait until the broth is reduced, because it is really easy to over flavor, since any flavors that you add are going to become more potent as it reduces.
  
• I always add salt (a little bit at a time until it tastes right) and usually about 1 tbsp of Italian seasoning, you can use whatever spices you like though, and I often change it up depending on what I plan to use the broth for. Or if I am not sure, I just don't add any seasoning at all and I worry about the spice later when I am actually cooking.
  
• Whatever the case, add your spices, simmer for 5 minutes, and then remove from the heat.
  
• I usually get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/2 gallon of stock out of this recipe. It will differ from batch to batch though, so don't get to worked up if you end up with more or less.
  

This stock doesn't have any preservatives in it, so it won't last more than a few days in the fridge. Either make it and use it right away, or freeze it in a sealed container In the freezer, it will last about 3 months.

The Apartment Vegan: A Manifesto

This being my first post, I figure I should start with a bit of a manifesto. Why the hell do I think that I know anything that anyone else cares to read? I suppose the whole point of this blog is that I would like to put information out there that I wish was easily available when I was first starting out as a vegan. There is a huge misconception that vegan food is boring and expensive, and that isn't at all true. Pre-packaged store bought vegan food is boring and expensive, but then again so is pre-packaged store bought omnivore food. Learning to cook your own vegan food is something that every vegan needs to do. Surprising few newly adopted vegans actually know how to cook for themselves already.

My plan is to try and share all of the useful tidbits of information that I had to learn the hard way, in hopes that it will help some other people make the choice to go vegan, or that it might make it easier on those who are first starting out. Trust me, I know how hard it can be, but I also know how easy it can be once you get the hang of it. I hope to share that with anyone who stumbles across this. Also, I really love food and want to talk about it as much as possible and I happen to be a vegan.

If you are looking for a vegan-blog full of wheat grass shots, broiled nut seed shell fiber loaf, and other such uber health conscious dribble, this is probably not the blog for you. That is not to say that I don't try to be healthy. I like staying fit just as much as the next guy and veganism is definitely a great way to lean in that direction. The thing is, I like food that tastes good. If there is a better tasting, but less healthy option, that is still vegan, I am probably going to use it. Being health conscious had absolutely nothing to do with my choice to go vegan, that was entirely based on my personal ethics.

Speaking of ethics, you are also pretty unlikely to hear me go on a rant about the plight of the animals and how meat eaters are murderers. Of course I don't think it is right to contribute to death and suffering, just to satisfy my hunger. The thing is, I don't think that it does anyone any good to walk around screaming, yelling, and tormenting people with pictures of slaughtered cows. In my opinion all that does is draw a clear line to separate the vegan and non-vegan camps. It paints the picture of the crazy vegan who only cares about animals and will do terrible things to you and your family if you disagree. When we make people scared of us, they stop listening to us. When we make people think we are crazy, they don't trust what we say.

My theory on reaching out to omnivores is this. Why don't we stop focusing on what is so horrible about their lifestyle, and trying to brow beat them into converting and just show them what is so great about our lifestyle. Being a vegan is awesome! Once more people see the good things about veganism and stop focusing on this misconception that all vegans are crazy people who are waiting in the shadows with cans of red paint to throw on their fur coats, they might just start listening to us.

That is probably the last paragraph you will read about my ethics (in this blog at least.) Like I said, this whole project isn't about sharing or showing off my morals. This is about me loving food. I love to buy food, I love to cook food, and I LOVE to eat food. Luckily for me I have crossed paths with some amazing people in my time as a vegan and have learned a lot about not just vegan cooking, but cooking in general. This has made it possible for me to eat delicious vegan food on a regular basis, even though I live on a relatively slim budget.

When I first became a vegan, I noticed one huge problem with almost every vegan cookbook that I came across (and trust me, after 12 years of Christmas' and Birthdays, I have about every vegan cook book imaginable) and that is that most all of the recipes rely on hard to find(and often expensive) ingredients. I don't want to have to make a weekly stop at the health food store, just to be able to cook dinner every night. I want to go to the little grocery on the corner of my block, just like everyone else, buy some food and then go home and cook. There are the rare occasions when I agree that there are uses for these exotic substitutes that so many vegan recipes rely on, but I think that should be the exception to the rule. So shortly after I became a vegan, I stopped reading vegan cookbooks and started spending a lot of time in the kitchen. Having an aunt and a brother who are both amazing chefs and endless sources of culinary knowledge has certainly helped me a lot along the way as have the countless other vegans that I have met over the years both in real life and via blogs and message boards.

Something I have always wanted to do was to write a vegan cook book that didn't rely on substitutes and just focused on making good vegan food with ingredients that are readily available. In my head I always called it The Apartment Vegan. I am hoping that this blog is a step in that direction.