Please Seat Yourself and Lick Your Plate Clean
Welcome to JP's kitchen cafe! My humble little work area transformed into an intimate setting for a respectable dinner party. Preparing a feast for 10 people sufficiently distracted me from my annual birthday depression. Five courses, no problems. If I could do this every weekend I would. There is something about sharing a layered meal experience with friends and family that basically sums up why I love food so much. It's so damn special. It is a great way to make an experience less about any one individual but more about food and a collective feeling of nourishment and joy. Of course, I will gladly accept compliments and gushing over whatever it is people are enjoying. But it is the content and atmosphere that I believe vegan food infuses into a situation. Sure this totally depends on the people with whom you are sharing a meal. Some prefer to linger and tip toe through the plate. Others frantically devour in an almost instinctual, pleasure-seeking frenzy! Both provide for great dinner company. Have you ever read or seen Like Water For Chocolate? Even though this book deals with mostly non-plants, it really influenced how I think about food. "Vegan food" in particular! I choose to make food that invokes surprise, nostalgia, memory, change, thoughtfulness without the visceral punch of the meaty variety. I do enjoy a good spice mixture that makes my insides giggle, but hopefully not at the expense of some other creature. Anyways, enough rambling. This is what I made! With the help of lovely, trustworthy friends! And my amazing mother who partnered up with me to make homemade fettuccine!
First came the antipasta. What a spread! Roasted red peppers with rosemary sea salt and garlic, roasted eggplant with herbs and balsamic, broiled zucchini with a sunflower seed crumble, marinated olives, and seitan salami! I used Vegan Dad's lunchmeat recipe to go off of but changed all the actual spices and ingredients. To get the salami-like flavor, I tried using red wine, garlic, white pepper and vinegar. For the color, I used smoked paprika and annato. Definitely needed more of both those things, but it was still awesome! White beans for the gross pieces of white fat that is in real salami. All of the beans fell out with I sliced the log. Oh well!
Then I made chestnut-sumac stuffed mushrooms. These were not photographed because I got distracted by making pasta and left them under broil for 1 minute too long! Why should I make you look at slightly burned mushrooms?? I have extra stuffing so I will blog that later on in the week. I KNOW YOU ARE JUST PSYCHED FOR THAT!!
Next course, seitan piccata! I am so not trying to be fresh with these weird grainy photos. For some reason I refused to turn on the light. The candlelight was not enough. I made the seitan from scratch until four in the mornin' on my birthday. It was awesome and totally worth it. The piccata sauce is from my blog! But I multiplied the recipe by 3 and discovered that was totally excessive and I have like 3 cups of sauce leftover! There are worse things.
Homemade fettuccine with steamed kale and a creamy butternut squash sauce from Pickarski's Friendly Foods. It was just steamed squash blended with a saute of celery, carrot, onion, garlic and spices. It was really fresh and healthy...so I threw a quarter cup of earth balance in and fixed that problem! :-)
My mom and I doubled up on the pasta and used my pasta roller for the first time! What an experience. Both laborious and simple! I used mostly pasta flour and then some semolina. I think next time I will use more semolina, more olive oil instead of water, and then make the pasta roller cut the noodles thicker. These were awesome, but very thin and almost rice noodle-like! The flat ones that you get in Pad Thai. Again, there are worse things.
Lastly, there was tiramisu and poached pears in amaretto. The tiramisu recipe ended up being a collage of internet findings that on their own didn't seem right to me. This was the foundation, a recipe on Seitan is my motor. I also made the ladyfingers recipe from Veggywood in addition to the ones on the German blog. Thank goodness I had both! Because I ended up making a huge batch of filling. Soy yogurt, cream cheese, cashews, flour, powdered sugar, coconut oil, amaretto and guar gum. Perfect! It was so incredibly delicious. So much in fact that there was none left to even take a photo! Ugh! Hate and love when that happens.
What fun. I totally dropped the ball on photographic evidence of this dinner, but I will leave you with this.
Cat party! I opened the windows for the first time in a long time. 65 degrees! Yes please!
That's all for now! Thanks for reading! You have a good night now.
jp
First came the antipasta. What a spread! Roasted red peppers with rosemary sea salt and garlic, roasted eggplant with herbs and balsamic, broiled zucchini with a sunflower seed crumble, marinated olives, and seitan salami! I used Vegan Dad's lunchmeat recipe to go off of but changed all the actual spices and ingredients. To get the salami-like flavor, I tried using red wine, garlic, white pepper and vinegar. For the color, I used smoked paprika and annato. Definitely needed more of both those things, but it was still awesome! White beans for the gross pieces of white fat that is in real salami. All of the beans fell out with I sliced the log. Oh well!
Then I made chestnut-sumac stuffed mushrooms. These were not photographed because I got distracted by making pasta and left them under broil for 1 minute too long! Why should I make you look at slightly burned mushrooms?? I have extra stuffing so I will blog that later on in the week. I KNOW YOU ARE JUST PSYCHED FOR THAT!!
Next course, seitan piccata! I am so not trying to be fresh with these weird grainy photos. For some reason I refused to turn on the light. The candlelight was not enough. I made the seitan from scratch until four in the mornin' on my birthday. It was awesome and totally worth it. The piccata sauce is from my blog! But I multiplied the recipe by 3 and discovered that was totally excessive and I have like 3 cups of sauce leftover! There are worse things.
Homemade fettuccine with steamed kale and a creamy butternut squash sauce from Pickarski's Friendly Foods. It was just steamed squash blended with a saute of celery, carrot, onion, garlic and spices. It was really fresh and healthy...so I threw a quarter cup of earth balance in and fixed that problem! :-)
My mom and I doubled up on the pasta and used my pasta roller for the first time! What an experience. Both laborious and simple! I used mostly pasta flour and then some semolina. I think next time I will use more semolina, more olive oil instead of water, and then make the pasta roller cut the noodles thicker. These were awesome, but very thin and almost rice noodle-like! The flat ones that you get in Pad Thai. Again, there are worse things.
Lastly, there was tiramisu and poached pears in amaretto. The tiramisu recipe ended up being a collage of internet findings that on their own didn't seem right to me. This was the foundation, a recipe on Seitan is my motor. I also made the ladyfingers recipe from Veggywood in addition to the ones on the German blog. Thank goodness I had both! Because I ended up making a huge batch of filling. Soy yogurt, cream cheese, cashews, flour, powdered sugar, coconut oil, amaretto and guar gum. Perfect! It was so incredibly delicious. So much in fact that there was none left to even take a photo! Ugh! Hate and love when that happens.
What fun. I totally dropped the ball on photographic evidence of this dinner, but I will leave you with this.
Cat party! I opened the windows for the first time in a long time. 65 degrees! Yes please!
That's all for now! Thanks for reading! You have a good night now.
jp
only you would cook a feast for your own birthday :-P
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