The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I baked! And I did not bake failure for once!
For the next three hours or so, both of my novels will be $1.99. For the rest of the day after that, Skylights and The Sanctum of the Sphere will be $2.99. That’s still 40% off! The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will remain 99 cents all day.
If you buy one, I will think fondly upon you while I eat cheesecake. I may even say your name, if you tell me what it is.
Yes, that’s spaghetti.
But that isn’t ground beef, nor is it sausage.
Longtime readers know that I dabble with vegetarianism occasionally, and that I enjoy me a tasty boca burger from time to time. Meat substitutes intrigue me. Some of them are better than others, and some of them are just good on their own merits. Boca chicken, for example, tastes enough like chicken for me, but Boca burgers don’t taste like meat at all. They’re still good, because lots of things that don’t taste like meat are good.
Some of the Subways in Chicago had a veggie patty that was goddamn delicious, but none of the ones in Indiana seem to have it. It’s very depressing.
Anyway, a couple of months ago I suddenly saw a bunch of articles all in a short period of time about Beyond Meat, a company that was so insistent that their plant-based meat substitutes were indistinguishable from meat that the CEO was insisting that, chemically, they actually were meat. I can’t find any of the articles now, unfortunately, but this page on their website makes a similar claim. Key to their definition: you have to call it “meat” because of what it is, not what it comes from.
Available at Whole Foods, starting in January. Well, OK. There’s a Whole Foods in town, and I’d needed an excuse to go pop in anyway, so I used part of my free day off yesterday to go check the place out. I came home with some Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles, which were around $5 for about 11-12 ounces.
Preparation was exactly the same as ground beef; I tossed it in a frying pan with a little bit of olive oil and sautéed it. I made the tomato sauce from scratch, and after tasting and seasoning it a bit I tossed it into the tomato sauce and let the meat and sauce live together for a little bit.
So here’s the skinny on Beyond Meat: It looks and cooks basically exactly like meat. I don’t think anyone would look at that picture and not recognize ground beef or sausage. And so long as you season it and put it with something, it tastes fine. But you know how whenever you make a meat sauce with pasta, your last bite is always just the meat, because the pasta is always gone first? Okay. That bite’s gonna be weird. The primary ingredient of Beyond Beef Beefy Crumbles is pea protein, and that last bite’s gonna getcha a little bit. The texture is a little– just a little— off, still, and you can sorta taste the pea even through the tomatoes and the oregano and rosemary and thyme and all the other stuff I had in my tomato sauce. Mixed with some spaghetti, though– basically anything else to chew on— and I would have fooled you.
Not quite perfect yet, in other words. But I’m keeping an eye on this company, and I’m curious about their not-chicken, because for whatever reason chicken seems to be easier to fake than beef.
Let’s start with the picture from the recipe, shall we?
And here’s the entire recipe. I found this on Facebook:
Shape into 1/2″ balls and place them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Press flat with a fork and then chill until ready to serve. Store in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to two weeks or freeze for up to two months.
Lies. LIES, I tell you! First of all, you cannot meaningfully do anything to four ounces of cream cheese with a mixer. Four ounces of cream cheese is a very small amount of cream cheese, folks! I knew this, but fooled myself into thinking I didn’t, and thus did not immediately double the recipe. The cream cheese immediately sucked itself into the blades of the mixer and stayed there, mocking me. Adding the sugar, a cup at a time, didn’t help much, and when I was done I had a lump of cream cheese and sugar maybe the size of a baseball. Maybe.
I love the verb “shape.” Does it say how? Of course not. I had pictured some sort of rolling with my hands, as I’ve done with a variety of meatballs and my reindeer shit, but it’s cream cheese with sugar in it. It’s way too goddamn sticky for that. I considered coating my hands with sugar, like I’d do with flour if I was working with dough, but, y’know, sugar is pretty sticky itself, and I don’t think that would have worked. I ended up using a melon baller, which did the job OK, I guess, but didn’t produce anything even remotely round. Press it with a fork? Fuck you, it sticks to the fork.
So basically I ended up with a dozen or so cream cheese lumps that I just put on a plate, because the idea that I needed an entire cookie sheet for them was ludicrous– this does not produce very many not-cookie things. They were horrifying-looking. I knew they’d be tasty, as I’d sampled them, and it’s not exactly surprising when peppermint, cream cheese and sugar produces something good, but hell if they didn’t look terrible.
So I melted a few dozen chocolate chips and drizzled some chocolate on them too, because to hell with it.
Nailed. It.
Other than discovering at the last second that we were out of garlic and doubling the recipe, I made this without modification. Delicious– especially with bread and butter.
If you are a sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you already recognize Chick-fil-A as the king of the chicken sandwich, serving chicken that is much like unto God in deliciousness and tastiness. (What’s that you say? God isn’t delicious? To which I respond: have you ever eaten God? I thought not. And then I respond again: Catholics, shuddup.)(*)
Unfortunately, if you are a good sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you recognize that Chick-fil-A serves their delicious chicken with a side order of bigotry and discrimination, and you don’t ‘specially want to give bigotry any of your money. Even if the chicken is delicious, chicken fried in the hate-oil of intolerance ain’t edible. Or some such overwrought figure of speech, I dunno.
This puts us decent folk in a bit of a quandary. Chick-fil-A is delicious. But we can’t have the delicious, no, we must deny the delicious, like Christ thrice denied Satan, or something like that.
But I love you. I love you so very much.
And so: I give you knockoff Chick-fil-A, courtesy of sliceofsouthernpie, who may well be horrified to see me linking to her recipe in these particular terms but I hope not because she seems like a nice lady. I am slightly modifying her recipe, which technically is for nuggets, so I’ll reprint the version we used here:
First, marinate your chicken: use the egg, the milk, and the pickle juice, whisk the hell out of it and put your chicken pieces into it (you don’t need to beat the hell out of them first or anything) and leave them in the fridge, airtight, for a few hours. Bek put ours in at lunchtime. Once you’re ready to start cooking, mix together all of the dry ingredients in a bowl. She suggests dredging through once; I think I’m going to authorize the dredge, dip back in marinade, then dredge again method, as our chicken came out slightly under breaded. Then fry ’em up.
Serve on a white bread bun, preferably heavily buttered and then slightly toasted in the oven (note that we didn’t do this), with exactly two pickle slices, preferably pickle slices dripping with pickle juice and pressed into the top bun. And one more thing: mine didn’t quiiiite taste right until I sprinkled a couple turns of sea salt directly onto the meat. Once I did that, other than the slight under breading, they were perfect. And marriage-equality-friendly, too! Wheeee!
(*) Yes, that’s a transubstantiation joke. I know, they’re not terribly common.
It’s Vegetarian Week 2, and apparently I can’t get through a vegetarian week without quinoa raising its unpronounceable grainy face somewhere. Plus since I was the only one who didn’t have to go to work today, dinner was obviously going to be on me.
“Peruvian” Quinoa Stew
“Peruvian” is in quotation marks because I somewhat doubt the provenance of the recipe. First, acquire and chop up all of the following:
I generally do a mise en place setup; in other words, get all my shit chopped up and in little bowls before I start actually cooking anything. Put the onions and garlic together, the carrots and celery together, and the zucchini and bell pepper together.
Before you start sautéing anything, get the quinoa going: boil about a cup of water in a small pot, and once it’s boiling put in half a cup of rinsed (RINSED!!! TRUST ME!!!) quinoa. Cover it and leave it alone for ten to twelve minutes; basically pretend it’s rice. You can start cooking everything else once the quinoa is in the water; the timing will work out nicely.
Get a big flat-bottomed wok or Dutch oven and put a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in it. Sauté the onions and the garlic together for about five minutes on medium-high heat, stirring frequently, then toss in the celery and carrots and put a lid on the Dutch oven. The celery and carrots should cook for about five more minutes; take the lid off and stir a couple of times while that’s happening. Check the quinoa at this point and see if it’s absorbed all the water. If it has, keep it covered, fluff it like it’s rice, and pull it off the heat; if not, add everything in the next part and then pull the quinoa after you’ve got the pot covered:
Add the following to your vegetables:
Stir it up, cover the pot, turn down the heat a bit, and let it simmer for another ten or twelve minutes. If the veggies are soft by then, toss the quinoa into the wok and stir everything up. You’re done.
Add a bit of cheddar cheese and maybe some sour cream once it’s in a bowl. Delish.
Here’s my policy on trying new foods: If you can adequately demonstrate to me that any given food is eaten by any community of actual humans, anywhere in the world, on purpose, I’ll try it. I’m specifying “on purpose” so that I can avoid eating foods that are clearly only considered “food” by necessity. If something is only eaten because the people who eat it can’t afford to eat anything better or because they live in some sun- or ice-blasted hellhole and there is literally no other food anywhere, I reserve the right to refuse to try it. But if you take those people and move them somewhere with a McDonald’s and a subscription to the Pie of the Month club and a generation later they’re still eating Grandma’s famous recipe for fried boar nuts, then I’m gonna try me some fried boar nuts if you put ’em in front of me.
There are really not a whole lot of foods that I’ve tried and won’t eat. I don’t like raw onions under most circumstances (guacamole being a rare exception); cook them at all and I’m all good. I’m not fond of peas if they’re mushy; peas that are cooked so that they sorta “pop” when you bite into them are fine. Green beans, baked beans. And I’ve reaffirmed this week that parsnips aren’t food.
(I’m doing the vegetarian thing again this week, in case you haven’t figured this out yet. I accidentally ate a piece of sausage and pepperoni pizza yesterday, so I’m doing a bad job. But dinners have been consistent.)
Let’s talk about Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts, quite possibly the least popular vegetable known to American culture.
I’ve had Brussels sprouts once. My wife made them. She is also not fond of Brussels sprouts, so we were both experimenting. They were boiled. (EDIT: My wife claims my mom made them. This is odd; my mother never made Brussels sprouts when I was a kid.)
I spit the damn thing out. I don’t do that with food, guys. I don’t care how bad I think something is, I’m gonna finish at least a bite of it before I punch you and refuse to have any more. My mouth sent me an immediate and unambiguous “this is not food WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING” message and I spit it out as authoritatively as if some miscreant had placed a live bee into my mouth. I’m not sure it was even in my mouth long enough to register the taste. Nope. Not food. Gone.
Here’s the thing, though: I can’t always trust myself. I spent the first year of our marriage saying things like “I don’t usually like shrimp, but…” every month or so until my wife pointed out that maybe I actually did like shrimp. So when she found a recipe for roasted Brussels sprouts and wanted to incorporate them into Vegetarian Week 2, I decided to roll with it.
They smelled good while they were roasting. Good sign, I thought.
“They’re not bad,” she told me as I was sitting down at the table. “Maybe a little bitter.” She doesn’t like these things either, remember, so I inspected her face carefully for signs of deception. She was quite entertained when I’d spit the previous attempt out, so this could have all been a ruse.
I speared one with a fork. Did my best Joe Bastianich impression as I lifted it to my nose, stared at it disdainfully, and smelled it.
And tasted it.
PEOPLE OF AMERICA! HELL, PEOPLE OF EARTH!
Why the fuck is boiling Brussels sprouts even a thing Jesus they’re goddamn delicious roasted WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
I know the picture above doesn’t look like much. Here’s the recipe: Brussels sprouts, apples, pears, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, a little olive oil, cinnamon, sea salt. Mix and roast. Serve over brown rice.
By the end of the meal I was literally using my hands to pack more food onto my fork. I could eat this forever. Same vegetable I spit out when it was served to me boiled. Delicious, delicious, delicious, go eat some right now. There’s a teeny bit of bitterness if you eat one solo but they’ve got this awesome nutty flavor to them and combining them with fruit and a bit of cinnamon is bananas good. Apparently there were supposed to be some (unroasted) cranberries scattered over the top as a last step; I can only imagine that making things better.
Seriously go eat some Brussels sprouts right now. Just don’t boil them. Why the hell would you boil them? You clearly already have heat and that’s the only thing you need to roast stuff.
Somebody bring me some lutefisk; I’m on a roll.
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