vegetarian – Eat Me. Drink Me.

Posts Tagged ‘vegetarian’

Like Eating Clouds: Hummus Tehina

Hummus tahina recipe (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

All I can think about is the next time I will be in Tel Aviv, how I will walk along the hot stone streets where discount boutiques spill hangers of fur vests and dresses and leather onto the cracked asphalt, and how I will walk until my feet are sore and I can smell the salt in the air, the crackled breath of exhaling fish and sea scum, almost hear the bustle of the Port of Jaffa just around an invisible bend, and I will wait at the little window of the hummuseria, hands palming the worn counter, until a short, bald man pauses in between tying up plastic bags of hummus tubs and shouting orders and talking to a regular leaning in the doorway. I will order musabaha and take it down to the sunny bench in the roundabout, and as cars whisk past, unpack my plastic bag and lay its contents out like offerings on an altar: musabaha, green chilies in lemon juice and water, two warm, plush pitas scarred with char, raw white onion quartered and beading in the sun, a film of paper-thin skin clinging to its curve. And then I will eat. I will streak tears of pita through the silky mass of tahini, lemon, garlic, and chickpea, catching drops of golden olive oil and spice, flecks of flat-leaf parsley and paprika, and whole chickpeas. And then I will chase it all with a crunch of raw onion I know I will regret a few hours later, when my tongue is swollen and my mouth tight and stale.

But it won’t be in a few hours, it will be now, and I won’t care about consequences, just the gentle swipe of pita, the feel of satin in my mouth. Like eating clouds, said the friend of a friend who said Abu Hassan was the place to go. » Continue reading this post...

Eternal Musings on Weather: Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Browned Butter

Sweet potato gnocchi (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

When I first stepped outside this morning on my way to the gym, I said, “Wow. What a beautiful day.” And then I paused. There was no sunshine, and a heavy, gray mist was starting to roll in from the south. The air smelled threateningly of rain and a brisk wind rustled right through my thick fleece jacket. And yet, comparatively, it was a beautiful day. The wind wasn’t bone-chilling, the mist had a lightness, an almost sepia-colored tone to it you might mistake for daylight. In this city, there have been three sun sightings in the last month, and the fall weather I love so much was a tease, a dream dangled before my eyes and whisked away faster than the leaves had time to drop.

Roast sweet potatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Growing up, some of my favorite movies were the BBC film versions of the Chronicles of Narnia. There’s a scene in The Silver Chair, where the witch, all snakey and draped in green, casts her magic spell upon the children, Prince Rillian, and Puddleglum the grumpy Marshwiggle. “There is no sun. There never was a sun,” she hisses as the candlelit orb casts shadows in the underground chamber. These days, I often feel like I’m trapped in her world, her scintillating syntax in my ear, “There is no sun. There never was a sun.” And I believe it.

It’s amazing what you’ll get used to, what baseline you’ll use to define new norms. Good weather is a gentle drizzle. Bad weather is a noon downpour where the sky is the color of a Secret Service entourage and the wind as unflinching.

Making sweet potato gnocchi (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I know. It’s so incredibly boring to talk about the weather all the time. I feel that I’ve turned into an aged alter ego of myself whose conversations all start out the same way. » Continue reading this post...

Market Day: Roasted Beet Salad with Gorgonzola and Balsamic

Roasted beet salad with beet greens (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

The Winterfeldt Market is a circus of color and noise. On Saturday mornings, it’s filled with people shopping for fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and baked goods of every hue. There are buckets of olives and pastes made with roasted eggplant, arugula, paprika, garlic, or chives. There are barrels of blooming flowers bursting with pops of purple, yellow, and pink. Trucks sell swirls of fresh pasta and raviolis alongside plastic tubs of pesto and long glasses of olive oil. One stand sells grilled fish, skin charred over an open flame – another sells raclette, silky with pungent cheese and brightened with fresh parsley and red chili flakes.

The market is walking distance from my apartment, at the end of a route that feels accustomed to my feet. Wherever I live, I find myself tracing familiar routes for as long as I can, before my destination chooses my route for me. If I were a river, I’d carve canyons along these trusted paths. Fanning like a star from my apartment, there’s the road that leads to the train station and the road to the park where I do my morning run, scattering rabbits breeding like clichés. The road that leads to work snakes through back alleys, through a school playground where I have to dismount my bike and walk between the shouting, shifting kids, up and around a grungy park, over a stretch of cobbled street and unpaved road that spills out onto the main thoroughfare. And then there’s the road that leads everywhere else: Out the door, a right, a right, and a left to Hauptstraße – Main Street.

Greens and raw garlic (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I pass the Baptist bookstore on the corner where they sometimes put out piles of free books. Dan Browns and romance novels, 90s teen fiction with faded purple covers and curly script. There’s a second-hand shop around the next corner, and I always glance in the big glass windows. » Continue reading this post...

An Admission: Free-Form Mediterranean Summer Salad

Mediterranean summer salad (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I am not very good at recipes, a fact which may surprise you, given that I write this blog presenting recipes that, ostensibly, I have written, and that are accurate representations of the photos I post.

Be that as it may, I am not good at recipes, either reading them or writing them. My memory leaves something to be desired, so when I cook from a recipe, I spend most of the active cook time re-reading the instructions. Was that 1 tsp. or 1 tbsp.? Was it fry-then-batter or batter-then-fry? It doesn’t matter if the answer is absolutely logical, i.e., obviously you batter the fish before you fry it – I always have to check. And check. And check again.

This is sometimes hard to reconcile with the way that I cook, which is to throw things together based on the pinch-of-this-dash-of-that philosophy. It’s a dreadfully exciting and, on the whole, rather unpredictable method of putting food on the table.

But I love reading recipes and cooking new things. Recipes inspire me. I especially love the complicated ones, with many steps and complex techniques. I love being surprised by new flavor combinations, love getting lost in the process.

Perhaps this all sounds rather contradictory: I’m bad at following recipes, but I love cooking from them? What this generally means in practice is that I read the instructions, read and re-read them as I cook, and then willfully decide to ignore them. I decide some step or other isn’t important, that an ingredient can be modified or left out entirely. I’ve cooked enough to trust my instincts, to know that everything will most likely be just fine.

Eggplant, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Roasting veggies for a Mediterranean summer salad (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Veggies ready to roast (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This way of cooking can make it hard to write recipes, however. If there’s a recipe I’d like to share on EMDM, I have to approach it differently. » Continue reading this post...

The Festival Season: Black Pepper Tofu

Life is slowly returning to normal post-supper club. The food-related nightmares have subsided, I can go grocery shopping without feeling panicked, and with the exception of the week I spent holed up in front of my laptop scavenging for stray commas and measuring margin sizes in the draft for the new issue of SAND that went to print on Monday, my to-do lists are feeling less pressing. Somehow, without my really having noticed it (I must have been buried in clauses), the tree in the courtyard exploded into bold green bedecked with conical rockets of white flowers.

Ground black pepper for black pepper tofu (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Shallots, ginger, garlic, and chili for black pepper sauce (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

May 1 came and went, and amidst the grumbles that no one is really protesting anything anymore these days, I gathered in Görlitzer Park with thousands of other Berliners soaking up the fresh spring sun like cats – protesting, for good or ill, nothing more than the warm beer being sold on street corners.

We’re entering the season of no work and all play. In just two weeks, there’ll be the Carnival of Cultures, a wild rumpus of color and sound, where the city celebrates the food, clothing, crafts, dance, and music of all its represented cultures. The streets are littered with crushed limes and plastic cups from Berlin’s favorite summer drink: the caipirinha – “caipi” for short – a mix of cachaça, cane sugar, and lime. Street vendors sell smoky jerk chicken and jollof rice. There’s kimchi and bratwurst, pierogis, falafel, empanadas, tacos, bulgogi… All the foods from all the places. The USA does soft-serve.

Blocks of tofu for black pepper tofu (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Festivals aside, the parks will be packed with sunbathers and kids flying kites. In Tempelhof, the cracking runways will be striped with rollerbladers and skateboarders zipping from end to end. Every table outside of every café will be crammed with people sipping coffees and reading the paper, their little dogs lolling beneath their chairs. » Continue reading this post...

It’s Not You, It’s Me. It’s Not Me, It’s Mercury: Vegetarian Chili Bowl

Vegetarian chili bowl (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I have broken nearly everything I’ve touched this month. Not just dishes and glasses, but hard-to-break things, like nail polish bottles and candles encased in heavy, shatterproof glass. I broke the little porcelain pig that holds the toothpicks, the Bodum French press, the bottle of hot sauce, the glass of anchovies that then dripped salty fish oil all over the kitchen floor. When I was making this vegetarian chili bowl, I showered the room with little bits of TVP as the bag fumbled from my hands.

Is this just a serious case of butterfingers? Or is it something more? January has been a hard month for me. My body aches like an old tooth. I’m cranky and easy to displease. I’ve had trouble waking up in the mornings and little energy for work. All of these things have made me an incredibly pleasant person to be around.

It’s especially frustrating because it’s exactly the opposite of what I want – not that anyone actively wants to be cranky and accident-prone. I’d set clear goals for myself for January, all of them designed to make me a more relaxed and easygoing individual. Read more books in the evenings, don’t use electronics before bed, don’t force yourself to keep working when the work day is done, make time for exercise, stretch in the mornings before work.

And this January, I’ve had about a 25% success rate for meeting my goals. When I manage to wake up without hitting the snooze button four times, I stretch – sometimes. When I don’t devolve into playing Hay Day on the couch at night, I read – sometimes. I’m more enticed by Facebook’s endless scroll than I’ve ever been, and the thought of addressing the email situation makes me feel like I’m willingly signing up to be Sisyphus. » Continue reading this post...

My Green Thumb: Fried Green Tomatoes with Sriracha Remoulade

I don’t have much of a green thumb. In fact, I think if my thumb were a color, it’d be a sickly ash brown, mottled with spots and covered with voracious aphids. All of the plants in my apartment are in various stages of death – it’s like they’re living, but unwillingly. Is it because I go for too long without watering them and then overwater in an effusive shower of liquid affection? Maybe. Is it because I’ve put the sun-seeking plants in the shadows and the shadow creepers right on the window sill? Could be. Not even the cactus is thriving. And that’s saying something.

Sliced green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Green tomatoes ready to be fried (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Fried green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

Alongside waking up with the sun every morning and reading the New York Times on my balcony with a cup of coffee, growing plants and gardening is something I’ve always associated with being grown up. I have no balcony, I live in a country where even the weekend NYT edition costs over 25 euros, and there is no sunshine in Berlin between the months of September and May. How am I supposed to be a grown up? All I have left of my childhood vision of what being an adult is, is that cup of coffee slowly chilling on top of a stack of taxes and bills I have to pay myself.

A stack of fried green tomatoes (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

This summer, I decided to take my future into my own hands and do some urban gardening. I may not have had a balcony, but I did have a French balcony (a euphemism for a long window) with a planter full of dirt. So I planted tomatoes. I started them from seed in tiny cardboard cups on a cake plate in front of the window. I watered them every evening and watched as gentle sprouts peeked out of the dirt and sweetly unfurled their furry little leaves. » Continue reading this post...

Body Positive: Crunchy Cauliflower Couscous Salad

Crunchy cauliflower couscous salad (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

I’m pissed. Just downright, straight-up peeved. I’ve been working out with an inspired consistency for the last six months. I go running two to three times a week, have a weight lifting program that focuses on strengthening my arms, shoulders, and chest. I stopped buying monthly train passes and ride my bike around Berlin instead. I’m probably the fittest I’ve ever been. But for all of that, I didn’t see the kind of results I’d been hoping for – until this detox.

I’m in the third week of my month-long detox. I’m not eating white carbs, refined sugar, or alcohol. I allow myself one cheat per week in each category, and I’m not a real stick-in-the mud about what constitutes a carb or whether I can’t eat ketchup because it’s packed with sugar.

But the thing that’s making me so mad is that it’s working. In the shortest amount of time, I’ve lost the weight six months of running couldn’t shake. Was it really that easy?

I feel conflicted about this for a few reasons. One, I’ve strongly opposed dieting for as long as I can remember. I love food, and I love eating – and anything that placed a restriction on my enjoyment felt like a lifestyle that wasn’t worth it. I could get behind eating smaller portions or trying to stop eating once I felt full – but to actually cut things out? The idea made me balk.

Two, I find the positive reinforcement about my weight loss both pleasurable and problematic. I enjoy hearing heartfelt compliments about my appearance (from people I know, not people on the street; that I never enjoy), but it makes me wonder – did I not look good before? Do I only look pretty when I’m thin?

Cauliflower couscous (Eat Me. Drink Me.)

What was most important to me during this detox is that I never felt a sense of deprivation – that I never felt hungry. » Continue reading this post...