Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Just a shout out to my vegetarian friends: I found out tonight that the red and green curries at Blue Orchid are not vegetarian even if you choose the tofu option; they contain shrimp paste. Likewise, the seared garlic entrée may contain fish sauce if you don't make a point to ask that it not be added.
Our server was veggie-aware and helpful, but had the misconception
that while a vegan
might object to shrimp and/or fish, a
vegetarian
would be okay with them. It's probably wise,
therefore, to tell the server you are vegan when ordering, even if you
are ovo-lacto.
Friday Five
Five dishes to serve at your vegetarian Thanksgiving feast:
- Corn Bread Dressing
- Arugula and Blue Cheese Mashed Potatoes
- Acorn squash stuffed with fruit and nuts
- Cranberry Sauce
- Sweet Potato Pie
Barbara's Corn Bread Dressing
This recipe is based on Barbara's instructions. She usually just wings it, measuring nothing, navigating by sight, smell, and feel.
Ingredients:
- Corn bread (8x8 baking pan), prepared and cooled
- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 2 celery stalks, chopped
- 1-2 Tbsp mayonnaise
- 1 tsp poultry seasoning or to taste
- 1 cup vegetable stock (more if needed)
- 1 egg
- Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Sautee onion and celery in olive oil (or any vegetable oil) until softened, about five minutes.
Crumble corn bread into a large mixing bowl. Add onion and celery, mayo, poultry seasoning, veggie stock, egg, salt, and pepper. Mix thoroughly with your hand (or a wooden spoon if squeamish). Mixture should be very moist, but not soupy.
Transfer mixture to baking pan that is large enough to hold it with some space at the top. Smooth and flatten the surface of the mixture. Bake at 350°F for about an hour. Serve hot.
Barbara says, if it's too moist after baking, just kind of crumble and mix it around with a spoon, and put it back in the oven for a while.
That's good eats.
Xochipilli Chili
I meant to post this here a while back, but somehow it slipped my
mind. This is a recipe developed by Jeff and me to enter in our company's recent chili cook-off.
Being vegetarian, we we pretty sure we had little hope of winning, what
with our chili's built-in deficiency. Our judges, though, had sympathy
for us, and we somehow managed to take second place. Our colleagues told
us a number of times, You can't even tell it doesn't have meat!
Xochipilli Chili
Vegetarian chili with roasted corn. Named for Xochipilli (show-key-PILL-ee), one of many Aztec corn deities.
- 2 10 oz bags frozen corn
- 4 15 oz cans black beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 8 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 3 Tbsp chili powder
- 3 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 4 tsp ground cumin seed
- 1 tsp cayenne pepper
- 3 4 oz cans diced green chiles (we used mild, but hot wouldn't hurt)
- 6 cups chopped tomatoes (fresh or frozen)
- 2 cups vegetable broth
- Approx. 3 Tbsp olive oil
Preheat oven to 400°F. Place one bag of corn in a large baking dish; mix in just enough olive oil to coat the kernels (about a Tbsp), and spread them out as much as you can in the dish. Roast the corn in the oven until browned, about 20 minutes. (Corn does not always brown. Be careful not to burn it.) Repeat for other package of corn.
While corn is roasting: Cook onion in remaining olive oil over medium heat. Use a pretty big pot; this makes a lot of chili. Cook onion until soft, about five minutes.
Add garlic, cumin, chili powder, cocoa, cinnamon, and cayenne. Work fast. Stir to coat onions with spice and toast the spices a little, about a minute.
Stir in broth, beans, chiles, and tomatoes; reduce heat to a simmer.
Cover and cook 15 minutes, then stir in corn and simmer for an additional 5 minutes.
This makes mild chili. We were being careful with the spices to make
sure it would be edible by people who don't push the Scoville
envelope the way we like to. Even so, we had to add a healthy
dollop of Sriracha, aka
rooster sauce
, before serving at the cook-off, to give it a little
heat. Next batch, I will added a seeded jalapeno or two to cook with the
onion, and maybe upgrade to hot diced green chiles.
Happy 2006
It seems odd to have to think about going back to work in the morning. Saturday night, we had a number of choices, but we decided to go over to Marin and Brian's. We expected hors d'oeuvre night, but it turned out to be Indian food night instead. I proudly placed my vegetarian sausage balls (a recipe inspired by the vegetarian sausage balls served on Christmas days over at Shannon and Curt's) on the table next to sag, dry potatoes cooked with mustard seed, tomato chutney, Gujarati-style green beans, and naan.
Despite my recipe yielding five dozen sausage balls, and it being Indian food night, there were none left to take home for breakfast. (Aside from being generally popular, Caitlin found a deep appreciation for the savory nuggets and made a pretty good dent in them herself.)
Everything was delicious, and at midnight, with Elvis Costello
finishing up Austin City Limits and U2's Achtung Baby starting to play
on the stereo, we cracked a bottle of Domaine Ste. Michelle blanc de
blanc. I'm not a big fan of (little c
) champagne as a rule, but
this was tasty. It was dry without being astringent, with hints of green
apples. Barbara and I chose this as the bubbly to serve at our wedding
reception eight years ago; it was good then too, but I don't think the
happy occasion is coloring my assessment too much.
I'm working on the back end for the search feature of this site. As
usual, perfect
is the enemy of good enough
. I'm writing it
in the form of a pyblosxom plugin, and, as long as I don't try to make
it too good, it'll be finished Real Soon Now™. Mostly, I want to
encapsulate the SWIG generated python API on swish-e. There are things
(search objects, error handling, iterating over results) that scream to
be more pythonic, but I'm fighting that urge in favor of getting it
working.
I've also ripped I bunch more discs onto juke. It's working great,
though there's one little problem I haven't figured out yet. The first time
I press play
after starting rhythmbox, I get two error dialogs:
ALSA device error
, and Unable to pause playback
. After
dismissing the dialogs, if I press play again, everything works as
expected. Still looking into this...
Sunday, we spent the afternoon with my brother, Steve, along with his girlfriend, Amy, and his kids, Emily and Taylor. We grazed on cheese, crackers, dips, and chips all afternoon, chatted, and set up his new computer. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird, and managed to transfer Amy's email data from Lookout Express on her old machine to Thunderbird on the new one...a good thing, too, since the old machine was clearly on its last legs. The power supply fan, when it managed to spin at all, mooed like a cow.
I was a little surprised to find that Thunderbird couldn't import her Outlook data directly. It has an Outlook Express import mode, but I couldn't get it to work with files I was bringing over from the other machine on my thumbdrive. To successfully import the data, I used DbConv to convert the Outlook .dbx files to mbox format, then imported them using Thunderbird's Eudora import mode. I'm glad I could get it to work; I was sweating that my much-evangelized free software was not living up to my evangelism.
I spent part of today looking into the WMF vulnerability. I've been surprised at the level of the rhetoric being used by security specialists. I've hardened the Windows box under my care using this information.
Vegetarian Sausage Balls
- 2 cups biscuit mix (We used Cooper's
Quickie
Biscuit Mix, but Bisquick or whatever will work just as well.) - 8 oz aged cheddar cheese, grated
- 1 package (14 oz) sausage style
Gimme Lean
- 1/4 cup finely chopped onion
- 2 or so healthy pinches poultry seasoning
- Black pepper to taste
Allow sausage to thaw. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Crumble (well...smoosh really) the sausage into a large mixing bowl. Add the other ingredients and mix by hand. The mixture will seem dry at first, but will come together after a few minutes and form a big ball.
Form mixture into balls about an inch in diameter. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes, until they just start to turn brown. Serve hot. (I made them in two batches. Putting them in a bowl covered with a towel kept them warm.)
Yield: around 60 balls.
[Sat Dec 23 23:24:46 CST 2006 Update: I used to use Boca sausage patties in this recipe, but I've switched to Gimme Lean. It's less expensive and just as tasty.]