Gratitude Journal
May 2024
Will May 2024 be a month I always remember as the one when I finally got my foot health on track?? Let’s fucking hope! It will definitely be remembered as a month when I became more fully conscious of a steady hum of dissociative depression that has been with me since the genocide of the Palestinian people began. Instead of starting the new series about writing that I’d announced in my newsletter last month, I went into a bit of a quiet, weirdo hiding zone; devoid of ambition, confused as to why I have ever felt moved to do anything in public at all.
Often when I’ve been in that zone in the past, I stop writing privately, too, and just feel tired and scattered and useless and bad. But this month I actually wrote a ton. During many of my novel sessions this month, I was suffused with a kind of beatific gratitude for the wild, unlikely opportunity to let myself float along the contours of my unconscious, to stare into the middle-distance and let sentences take shape, to move words around on a MacBook Air in an apartment of my own. This may sound cheesy, or sanctimonious, but it’s true.
It was for sure a month wherein I ran a kind of deranged number of vegan custard tests for no particular reason other than that I felt driven to prove it can be done. One morning, after consuming at least a cup and a half of custard boiled and baked into various states, I asked myself just what in the hell I was doing. For the first time in a long time I thought about the chickens crushed into their battery cages, all around the world. I guess I’ve been thinking about the generative potential of abiding grief? Something like that.
As per above, I also started learning to stretch and articulate my toes; to recognize each of them for the cute individual phalanges they are. It has felt strangely profound.
I think that’s all I have to say about any of that for now, except maybe the custard. I wrote a bunch, I read a bit, but this month I mostly just feel like sharing some of the vegan food I made during my one precious life in the month of May, for which I am more than ever so grateful.
Eating:
If you want more detail on any of these dishes, by all means ask in the comments! Happy to share!
Remember last month when I foraged all that garlic mustard from the park near my house? I made it into this pesto which I served over gnocchi and roasted carrots and crispy shio koji marinated tofu crumbles. I don’t fully remember what was in the pesto, but I think garlic, ground almonds, olive oil, and if I know myself a soupçon of umeboshi paste. Very delicious invasive weed!
I made
’s Charred Lemon Risotto from her book Start Here and topped it with another El-Waylly banger, crispy roasted yuba (aka beancurd skin). I have to confess I didn’t fully believe Sohla when she said that the oil flavoured by the charred lemon, plus its juice squeezed on at the end would lend the dish “unbelievable depth and richness,” but the lesson learned is I can always trust her. I didn’t have butter and parm to help the lemon along of course, so I did add alliums and wine and various ferments as I typically do, as well as a bunch of escarole. I can’t for the life of me make roasted yuba look appealing in a picture, but trust me when I tell you to do this. I get mine frozen from a Chinese supermarket, soak it in salted water for fifteen minutes or so, drain, toss in olive oil, salt, pepper, and nutritional yeast and roast on a parchment-covered sheet pan at 425 for 20 mins or so. It’s so good, especially alongside comforting, porridge-y risotto.
This one is based on the Spanish-style Cast-Iron Garlic Shrimp with Chorizo and Green Olives recipe in Company by Amy Thielen which I had out of the library (I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: getting cookbooks out of the library rules!) Instead of shrimp, I used big ol’ Royal Corona beans, which is something I’ve been doing with various shrimp recipes of late, sometimes marinating in seaweedy sauces first, sometimes not. They don’t have the same texture as shrimp of course, but they have great texture all their own, and when you fry or roast them and crisp their skins a little? It’s a yes from me. I also made my own seitan chorizo which turned out super-well, and classically wrote down nothing about what I did. You could use any paprika-y storebought vegan sausage and get a great meal out of this I do believe!
Little Poll:
Okay, this one I did write down, and I will maybe even send out the recipe soon, once the local eggplants start popping off. It’s my fave vegan take on eggplant parmesan to date, doable on a weeknight, enough protein to fill me up, I’m INTO IT.
Do you guys know about massa de pimento?? I didn’t until I literally went to the Azores a couple of summers ago, even though it’s been readily available to me right here in Toronto all my life (Toronto is home to a very high number of people originally from the Azores, which blesses us with many fabulous Portuguese bakeries and grocery stores). The easiest way for me to describe massa de pimento is that it tastes like Louisiana-style hot sauce that is not at all hot. Just acidic, salty, delicious, bright red pepper paste. I’ve been buying it for a few years now, and have on my list to do a whole post about my love for it, but that may never happen so here’s something anyway. This year I made my own for the first time with some lovely red shepherd peppers. All you need is peppers, salt, time, and a decent blender! I don’t think the peppers are the ones the Azoreans use. My paste tastes great, but is thinner and a little more bitter. I’ll try again when the Jimmy Nardello peps emerge this summer. And if anyone knows the name of the actual pepper I should buy, please let me know!
Fermentation-wise I also made the fermented mustard greens from
’s The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, a book I will never shut up about. Serendipitously, Che published the wonderful George Lee’s recipe for Savoury Soy Milk in her newsletter that makes use of these salty, punchy greens. I made it three times in a week! The first time I made it with supermarket soy milk, which was good, but did not attain the sort of curdy, custardy texture Lee speaks of. I found some very fresh soy milk in the cutest cup in China town and made it again, and the texture was truly delicious, like the silkiest ribbon of eggs in a soup, you know what I mean?
Okay wow, please forgive the picture, but I got some additional fresh soy milk to finally attempt some “exploding juice tofu” which I learned about from
. He had kindly sent me a recipe for how to do it at home, and I figured if I didn’t have to make my own milk first it wouldn’t feel like such a daunting task. This tofu is a regional speciality from Guizhou province in China. You can learn all about how George Stiffman apprenticed to make it in this awesome article. This tofu is set with acid — specifically the lactic acid in fermented mustard green brine — so you can see why the time was now. Once the tofu is set, you alkalize it with baked baking soda, let it hang out a few hours, and then cook. The alkalizing process causes the tofu to sort of melt, while baking or grilling it at a high temp creates a skin to contain the melted middle. I didn’t get any good pictures or videos, so you have to trust that inside of the weird bulge in that busted-looking piece of tofu was a creamy, molten centre! I did send George one of my gross videos just to see if I was on the right track, and he said to up the baking soda next time to get it juicier. So one of these days, I will. Science, man. Cool as hell.
These are some Korean-style cheongs I made from some of the season’s first rhubarb (a fruit and sugar syrup if you’re unfamiliar). To one I added some dried dandelion leaves I had around, and put some sumac in the other. Cheongs take longer than a cooked simple syrup, but I think they’re so much yummier because you get the full flavour of macerated raw fruit. I made these mostly to mix with soda water for non-alc drinks, but I also made a kind of rhubarb cosmo with lemon juice, orange bitters, vodka, and a splash of soda for a lil treat a couple of times.
Okay, custard time!
Last summer I posted this threat to veganize all of
’s Sweet Enough kind of as a joke because I knew it would take me years. I am kind of doing it in a very slow-paced way. But I grew especially fixated on the pastry cream after I posted this because of my own hubris in suggesting I could do it. The above is, in my not-so-humble opinion, pretty damn good.
My current pastry cream employs my favourite “secret ingredient” of late, fava bean flour, which I buy from the fine folks at Cuisine Soleil. You could just blitz dry split fava beans in a good blender or food processor, too.
Sure, the colour leaves a bit to be desired, I may add a little turmeric or annatto next time, but I truly feel it’s getting there and I must say I’m thrilled! There’s plenty of vegan pastry cream recipes out there already of course, but most rely simply on additional cornstarch in place of the traditional egg yolks, and I often feel there is something, well, custardy, missing from those. So! My full origin story with fava bean flour is in here somewhere should you be dying to know, but in short I feel like fava beans can do a lot of what egg yolks can, they’re really that bitch, it’s absolutely fixing to be a hot fava flour summer in my neck of the woods. Pictured above is Roman’s Simple Fruit Tart (the video for which is one of my faves, really leans into her control freak tendencies which I relate to hard for better or worse). It’s an easy shortbread crust filled with pastry cream, topped with fruit, and chilled. For the fruit, I used the macerated rhubarb I strained out of my cheongs described above, cooked down a little bit, and tossed in a bit of their syrup. Please give me the no-waste angel award. 😇
Finally I tried baking the pastry cream (in a pan, no crust, I was sick of baking by then) to see if it would also work for Roman’s Caramelized Vanilla Custard Tart, and while it may look like it worked, I am humble enough to admit it really didn’t. The moisture mostly evaporated and the custard became a kind of creamy pancake? Which was definitely a delicious treat when I came home from a friend’s place lightly stoned, but was not…it. Onward! Hot fava summer! Thank you forever for reading, free Palestine, goodbye!
Fun to read, amazing how you find all these strange ingredients 😎😎