Wild graaaaaaapes!!!

Augtemberish 2024

Hey, hi! This post was supposed to go out on August 25th, which was the two-year anniversary of this newsletter and then, well. That didn’t happen. I had intended to spend all of my non-day-job August time taking a break from my novel and doing a real newsletter-palooza. But I crapped out on that pretty fast and spent the rest of my break doing wildly hyper-focused yeasted vegan pastry R & D in my kitchen, lolll. It was honestly so fun! Probably I’ll write about it one day! But that day is not today. Today I’m moving forward with my original “anniversary party” plan, which is a classic “fun vegan stuff I’ve cooked and eaten” run-down because, well, that’s how I like to party! And I think at least some of you like to party that way, too?

I started this thing two years and a month ago just to kind of see if I could do it, if it would feel fun, if I could do it sustainably. Truly, I remain a bit shocked that the answer to all of those is still yes. I had very few subscribers when I launched, and today there are just shy of 400 of you. That kind of blows my mind. I know that 400 subscribers is peanuts to some, but I seem to stubbornly do zero of the things recommended in all those “grow your followers” and “build your platform” articles, and still you’re here? I’m extremely grateful! I have no clue who many of you are, so if you feel like letting me know in the comments or The Chat, I would love it! But zero pressure; I love, respect, and relate to a lurker.

One thing I know for a fact is that there wouldn’t be nearly as many (or any?) of you without the support of many kind friends who have shared this thing around. Thanks a million to all who have done so these past two years! I wanted to take a moment to especially shout out fellow veg-heads and far more prolific, legit, and savvy food professionals than I will ever be:

Alicia Kennedy

,

Andrew Janjigian

, and

Lukas Volger

. Their support has meant the world to me, both in terms of visibility of what I’m up to here, and because I’m a big fan of what they’re doing with their newsletters, so I’m thrilled they would share mine. If you’re into hard looks at food politics, bread, vegetables, martinis, newsletter advice, protein-packed vegetarian recipes, and/or fun, I highly recommend checking them out and paying for a subscription to any or all of their newsletters if you haven’t already!

Okay, here we go, let’s party! I’ll get back to tidier monthly stuff soon, but what follows is a selection of favourite meals from the whole damn summer, not really confined to August or September. It’s a mess, and so am I! Thanks again for inviting me into your inboxes, I really like talking to you guys!

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Party Time!

(If the photos are too small or the email cuts off, you can view it better here.)

My sister-in-law asked if I would bring a Greek-style pasta salad to her dad’s father’s day celebration, so naturally I made my own vegan feta cheese for the occasion. Not only that, I decided to make it hours before I left to visit my own dad for father’s day, leaving my poor partner David to flip and check on the draining cheese in my absence. As such, he enjoys proclaiming, “I made the cheese!” and while he’s kidding, he’s also kind of right? Whenever I finally do it, I’m surprised at how easy cheese-making is in many ways. It’s just a matter of getting the temperature, cultures, and timing right, but most of it is waiting while it does its own thing. Anyway, this is a soy milk cheese, made with store-bought soy milk (you have to use the kind with no stabilizers, which can be hard to find, so I used Eden in spite of their sketchy politics, I’m so sorry). I very loosely followed Anderson Santos’ recipe, but largely did my own thing involving mesophilic cheese cultures, gypsum, and ground-up dried rice koji. IT TURNED OUT SO GOOD!! Creamy, flavourful, slice-able, just lit. I will try to do a whole post about it and some other cheese I’m working on later this year.

In July, David and I went to my favourite place in the world, Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts, for two whole weeks. Among the many wonders of this place is that there is a vegetable garden from which artists are invited to pick whatever they like. When I got sick of writing my novel on the beach, or swimming in the lake, or communing with Toronto Island cats, etc. I would spend many meditative minutes creeping around the garden in the afternoon heat, squinting at the blur of somewhat wild and tangled plants until pole beans and cucumbers and a few early tomatoes snapped into focus like those old Magic Eye images. One day I found some HUGE zucchinis using this method, and made a giant pot of

carla lalli music

’s Melted Zucchini Pasta. I didn’t have my usual anchovy-replacement ingredients along, so I used a little tomato paste, soy sauce, and chopped capers to amp things up, and that was good, too! This is truly the best way I’ve ever encountered to use up a ton of zucchini. I grate it rather than chop it as Carla does, because I find grating zucchini weirdly satisfying? Try this, it’s great! Fall bonus tip: treating butternut squash the same way is also great. I like to serve the resulting squash sauce with white beans and crispy-roasted kale.

There’s only a little hot plate in Portable 3 where we stay, and I kind of like the liberating constraint of so little equipment, as well as letting the garden inform what I make. Speaking of liberating constraints, there was an LCBO (our state-run liquor store) strike while we were on the island, so we had to make do with the grocery store’s meagre selection. We ordered two deliveries while we were out there, and both times the store was so picked over they sent totally different things than we’d ordered. In my case, while I’d ordered canned white wine spritzers, they sent a magnum of full-bodied red. In the nick of time, I remembered about the Spanish cocktail, Tinto de Verano — red wine and Sprite! — which I’d been wanting to try anyway. Reader, I’m obsessed. I shall drink this for the rest of my days. I like to do a little Sprite, a little soda water so it’s not too sweet, and squeeze a little lime juice in there, too. We also ate a metric ton of Beavertails, vegan without the butter in case you didn’t know.

I brought a bag of zucchini flowers home from the island with me, stuffed them with a blended mixture of silken and fermented tofu, garlic, a little cornstarch and nutritional yeast I think, then battered and pan-fried them along these lines. They were amazing and lessened the blow of being back at home. The fact that our little fire escape garden was overflowing with beautiful nasturtiums was another nice treat upon our return, and I used some leftover batter to turn some of those into cute fritters, too (on the right).

I also used nasturtium leaves instead of spinach to make green pici pasta from a Jamie Oliver recipe I had made before years ago. When I read up on pici before I made them, I learned that this pasta went viral on TikTok in 2021. So I guess I’m very cool and young.

Also on our fire escape, the cilantro plant was going to seed. Luckily some of the seeds were still green, and I had recently read

Peter

’s recipe for fermenting these beautiful pearls into a delightful condiment. I only got a few tablespoons of seeds, but I brined them anyway, and they did indeed add a unique little pop of flavour atop salads and things. Recommend!

In foraging news, early in August I was walking in the park with David and he casually pointed out a wild grape vine he had spotted. I lost it. I’d had no idea there were wild grape vines here in Ontario, and now David was telling me they’re kind of everywhere, actually. I was so fucking hyper, I can’t even tell you! I went home, googled feverishly, and spent a very satisfying day picking beautiful wild grape leaves, making these dolmas (I used lentils seasoned with mushrooms, soy sauce, etc. instead of beef) and…

…I made a super-weird non-alcoholic aperitif that included a teeny amount of verjus squeezed from a sprig of unripe wild grapes I’d picked, as well as an infusion made from staghorn sumac also from the park (I’m separating out sumac drupes in the photo bottom left), and a whole host of other locally grown herbs and whatnot. I brought this to a cottage to try with friends, and we declared it pretty strange and too intense, but…okay? Interesting! I’ll keep working on this kind of stuff when I’m in the mood because I love to a) motivate myself to drink less alcohol, and b) witch out.

Once I knew about them, I started seeing wild grapes everywhere! If you know Toronto, top right is the underpass at Dupont and Christie — teeming with wild grapes! I checked on the clusters in our park just about daily into September, finally picked a decent amount, macerated them in sugar overnight, and oh my god the sweetened juice tasted so good and was the most beautiful colour I’d ever seen. I decided to strain them and attempt a micro-batch of jelly — something I don’t do much — and things were going so incredibly well until they weren’t. I turned my back for one second, and the whole batch turned brown and smelled burnt. Because it was. It also stiffened to hard caramel texture when I decanted it into a jar in hopes that the burnt-ness could be passed off as intentional. It was an entire mess, and I was somewhat disproportionately sad. All the other wild grapes in my neighbourhood are either too proximal to excessive exhaust or growing too high in the trees to ever reach. I think I’ve blown my chance for this year, but live and learn, baby! Next year there will be jam!

I’ll close this out with a little Toronto Oktoberfest I threw for my lovely cousin, Janna and her lovely husband, Javier who visited from Germany. Actual Bavarians! Mostly I’m sharing this to remind you that I have a recipe for vegan bratwurst made from a mix of seitan, lentils, and buckwheat (they’re really good, I promise! Actual Bavarian approved!) My friend who provided the backyard and bbq had bought good old Johnsonville Brats for the meat-eaters. At the end of the night we were in the kitchen laughing about old Johnsonville Brat commercials, discussing the differences between American and German brats, saying it “braht,” like, “ah” in the middle, which is both the German and Johnsonville way to say it, and it felt like we were saying “braht, braht, braht” a million times as we chatted away. Suddenly Janna said in this perfectly deadpan, somehow quintessentially German way, “Braht summer.” And we died! Joke of the night! Joke of the summer! And now, I suppose, it’s done. I had a pretty great one, and I hope you did, too. ❤️