Garam Masala

Spice up your life!
We just LOVE spices at our house. They add so much flavor and character to an enormous range of dishes. No world cuisine would be complete without spices and their leafy cousins, herbs. The term spice usually refers to the dried seeds of different plants, sometimes herbs, shrubs or trees. One spice known the world over is pepper, which are the dried seeds of a vine. Coriander are the dried seeds of cilantro. Cardamom grows on big towering trees. Many spices are imported from tropical climates, but many can also be produced locally or even in your own backyard. Spices are incredibly beneficial for health, stimulating your body and all its systems. In fact, before modern science, spices were medicine and can still be used to that effect. Personally, I like to make my medicine delicious and eat it!

Blackberry Squash

Summer Blackberries are one of life's greatest pleasures. Juicy, sweet and messy, they can dye my fingers and mouth purple with bliss because I just can't stop once I start! Squash is a fruit drink popular in the UK. It's pretty much a fruit flavored syrup mixed with sparkling water and tastes like a fruity soda made with real fruit juice. Back in the olden days, they made squash with whatever fruit was on hand, sugar to preserve it, and then medicinal herbs and spices.

Fried Green Tomatoes

If you're lucky enough to have tomato plants at home, and people seem to really love growing tomatoes pretty much everywhere I've been, you are now in the era of patience. In our greenhouse, we have so many tomato plants they are creating their own microclimate! I started buying tomatoes back in February, I was so excited about summer even though it was still months away. And now the vines are filled with fruit, staked and tied and growing taller by the day. But the fruit is green! Tomatoes love to ripen at the hottest time towards the end of summer, and in Northern California that means August, September, even October. 

So if you're hella impatient like we are, and you feel like a special treat worthy of the old South, slice, dredge and fry up those green tomatoes.

Baby Zucchini with Flowers

I'm not going to sugar coat this: it already feels like summer in the Bay Area. It has been sunny, warm and clear most days this Spring. This year more than any other, even with the mild temperatures, I was ready for winter to be over as soon as we celebrated the new year. The short, dark days left me craving more... especially when we had a Greenhouse (or two) in our back yard waiting to come back to life as the days get longer and the sun gets brighter. Well now it has happened so fast I hardly know what to do with myself... all the seeds that I sprouted beginning in the late winter months are already bearing fruit! As far as the plants are concerned, in the hot box that is our Greenhouse, it's already summer! It is humid, hot and bursting with life.

Cheers to Friday!

Last Friday evening I came home from work exhausted and beyond ready for the weekend to begin. Kyle greeted me with excitement, explaining that we had our first summer strawberry harvest! The strawberries were plump, bright red and READY to be devoured. I looked down and noticed our mint was bursting out of it's pot and remembered that we had a bottle of Rosé chilling in the refrigerator. With a burst of energy that only comes when you know you're about have a cocktail from the garden, I bounded into the kitchen and whipped up a Refreshing Strawberry Spritzer! It was the perfect way to begin our Friday night and I can assure you that we'll be enjoying this light, refreshing cocktail again tonight! 

Refreshing Strawberry Spritzer

Feel free to make this spritzer your own by adding as much of each ingredient as you like!  

Ingredients:

1 bottle of Rosé
1 bottle of Seltzer
3 sprigs of Fresh Mint
8 Strawberries (with the tops removed)

Method 
Lay out for wine glasses.  In each glass slice a strawberry and tear up 3 mint leaves. Add as much wine as you think fit (we filled the glass a bit less then half) and top of with cold seltzer.  Use remaining strawberries and mint as a garnish.

Herbed Couscous Salad

The short, chilly days of winter are upon us. But as the days begin to lengthen and the sun begins to shine, we can feel the promise of spring and summer on the horizon. Here in Northern California, the cold rainy winters may not be good for tomatoes and stone fruits and other summer delights, but even in the dead of winter, we can get fantastic greens. Greens seem brighter and more alert in the winter, and our bodies are even more eager for the chlorophyll and nutrients that includes! Herbs like mint and parsley are widely available year-round, and full of fresh, clean flavors. Baby wild arugula, peppery and intense, mixes nicely with the herbal notes. This recipe uses the three herbs like greens rather than seasoning, leaving the leaves whole and tossing them with whole wheat couscous for a hearty and refreshing dish. If you are as lucky as we are and you have a mom who preserves her bountiful summer crop of serrano chiles by making a flavorful sambal (chile paste), then by all means, make it as spicy as you like.


Herbed Couscous Salad
Feel free to use any combination of your favorite herbs, also try substituting quinoa, millet or another grain for the couscous.

INGREDIENTS:
about 4 cups cooked whole wheat couscous, chilled or at room temperature
about 1 cup packed baby arugula leaves
1 bunch mint, whole leaves removed from stems
1 bunch parsley, whole leaves removed from stems
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
salt, to taste
sambal or chile paste, 2 tablespoons or to taste

METHOD:
Combine couscous, arugula, mint and parsley in mixing bowl. Stir to incorporate. Whisk together all remaining ingredients to make a dressing. Stir in dressing and taste couscous for seasoning.

Green Pesto

Grilled Vegetable Platter with 3 sauces: Olive Tapenade, Green Pesto and Mushroom Pâté

Yes, it's fall! We love this time of year, with the leaves changing, the chimneys coming alive with smoke and a chill in the air. Wait a second... this is San Francisco, and October is feeling very different than your typical fall moment. Any month of the year, cold foggy nights and gray sweater weather can dominate. But for a few magical days, it is hot day and night, everyone is smiling and tan in their shorts and this metropolis by the bay actually feels like California.

Vegan Big Island

From the Kona Farmer's Market

Ashley and I went to the island of Hawaii for our honeymoon! Our wedding, replete with vegan feasting and an epic dance party that left me limping down the stairs the next morning, couldn't have been better. But - in spite of the bliss of the event, and the affirmation of 15 months (plus a lifetime) of work on Ashley's part - we were so relieved it was all over and we could escape to an island!
So for us any trip anywhere is about eating, and because on a honeymoon you don't even have to pretend to do anything else, we pretty much ate our way around the island.

Cinnamon Rolls

I am spending my days cooking for young people who want to change the world! Youth Empowered Action (YEA) Summer Camp is for kids who care about making our earth a better place. As part of the mission of the camp, vegan food is served to campers and staff. We explain that for people who want to eliminate injustices in our wold, the SAD Standard American Diet makes no sense. So not only do we want to educate them about helping others, but show them how delicious it can be!

Peanut Dressing

Peanut Butter, the miracle food. Ashley needs only a spoon and maybe some chocolate chips to enjoy the sticky stuff, which she does pretty much every day. I love chocolate and peanut butter like any red-blooded American, but the thick, greasy paste coats my mouth and leaves me thirsty. In our house, because I don't eat it by the spoonful every day, it sometimes seems like I am a PB hater. Not true! But I do prefer to thin the stickiness out of the PB and turn it into peanut sauce. And peanut sauce... that I can eat every day!

New York City Adventure!

New York City in the last week of June. Glittering, steamy city... full of beautiful people and intoxicating energy. We traveled across the country to our old stronghold for our friend's wedding, and ending up spending a few days high on the summertime bliss of the frantic, unstoppable Big Apple. In terms of just about everything, New York is a machine of unparalleled size and efficiency. Anything you could ever want... there is lots to choose from, and lots of people there. Vegan food is no exception. The number of places has even grown since I left the city over a year ago, and following my stomach around Manhattan and Brooklyn led me to many delicious adventures.

Avocado Salsa Verde

More salsa! In our world, there is never such a thing as too much salsa! At our neighborhood taqueria (Oh the joy of being in California...) they have a salsa bar, and our favorite is a spicy, tangy salsa verde. It is hot, but mellowed out by the creaminess of avocados. For taco night, we tried to whip up a batch ourselves.

Grilled Salsa

One day while I was in high school and watching Martha Stewart on TV with a friend, she opened her show with the following sentence: "The number one condiment in America isn't ketchup or mustard. It's salsa. Fresh, delicious, beautiful salsa." Her zealous use of adjectives made me laugh and anything that I liked for years was "fresh, delicious and beautiful." Martha and I may not agree on many things, like the distribution of wealth or eating animals and their secretions, but boy do we agree about salsa!

Kelp Noodle Salad

You are probably thinking right now, what are kelp noodles? When I came across a recipe for kelp noodles in a vegan cookbook, my first thought was that pieces of kelp had been sliced thin and were being used like noodles. Being a reluctant seaweed eater, but someone who insists on making seaweed a part of my diet anyway because of its insane health benefits -- more vitamins and minerals than any plant grown on land -- I did not want to eat a big bowl of sliced kelp. But when I stumbled upon a package of kelp noodles at the Asian market, I couldn't resist. They look like clear vermicelli noodles, but they are made out of only kelp! As a result, they have all the nutrients of kelp but without the starch that is the basis of most noodles. All this sounded good, but what about the taste? Delicious! Different than any other noodle, they retain their firm texture, almost crunchy like a vegetable in the mouth. But for a light summer meal, they were exactly what the doctor ordered. 

Roasted Marinara

When people talk about quintessentially American foods, they usually think about meatloaf or some canned-soup casserole or maybe a gluttonous Thanksgiving table with a giant carcass in the middle. Not my kind of America! The great USA is a melting pot, and some cultures have been here so long their traditions have become embedded in our consciousness. For us, the most American of all meals is pasta with red sauce, a green salad and some garlic bread. The fact that this also happens to be vegan is bonus points! Sometimes living in Northern California really feels like being in Italy, and growing up here, where tomatoes grow to be eight-feet tall, passion for pasta sauce run deep.

Canyon Gourmet

In 2009, my dad invited me to join him on a 21-day river trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I knew there were treacherous rapids, dangerous hikes, and no escaping the river or the people in your group for three whole weeks. I also knew this was as close as you can get to one of the wonders of the natural world, and that my dad had done this trip eight times, each time wanting to go right back to the beginning and start all over again. So when he won a coveted permit through the lottery system, I did not hesitate; this experience may be once in a lifetime, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity.
Well... it turns out I got bitten by the Canyon bug as well. As soon as I got back, I entered my name into the lottery system for a permit of my own. And I won! The responsibility of coordinating and planning a trip now fell on me. I knew it was incredibly important to have a group with whitewater experience, to keep us all safe, and that everyone had to be hardworking, positive and easygoing. The real risk of having a bad trip isn't in the elements; it's the people. So I put together a group of older men who have done this trip dozens of times between them, and my younger friends, a few of whom had almost never camped a day in their lives. With a group in place that I felt confident about, I could turn my attention to the most important of matters: the food!

When I returned from my first trip, I had many people ask me if I was okay with the food... was I eating enough? My answer was that I had never eaten so much in my entire life. The difference between river rafting trips and other camping trips is that you can carry everything you need for a gourmet kitchen on your rafts. We had pots and pans, chef's knives, crates of root vegetables and citrus and melons and coolers and coolers full of any ingredient you may ever need. For an average lunch, I would eat: two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, several handfuls of nuts, some chips, an apple, an orange, as many cookies as I could eat and wash it down with a beer or two or three. And a few hours later, I was hungry for dinner!

So when I first got my own permit, I was so excited to plan the food for the entire group. Initially, I thought I could happily force everyone to eat vegan for the whole trip. Later, I backed away a little bit from the idea, saying that I would take care of everything we might need for breakfast and lunch (and of course it will all be plant-based and very delicious) and that we would be split into cooking groups for dinners: as long as they were making vegan food that I and the other vegans could eat, I wasn't going to forbid them from adding animal products too. To my delight, most dinners we had were completely vegan! And so delicious! Even the only cooking group made up entirely of omnivores, affectionately named TEAM MEAT, made delightful vegan meals, including campfire-baked potatoes with make-your-own mushroom shish kabobs and desserts like pineapple upside-down cake and fudgy brownies. Everyone happily used the egg replacer I placed in the "BAKE - SWEETENERS" box of ingredients in their desserts. And no meal was lacking in flavor, as we had an excellent flavor toolkit in the "STAPLES - SPICES" box.

Cooking in the Grand Canyon is not what I'd call easy... the first task is lugging all the heavy equipment from the rafts into a flat section of camp designated the kitchen. Tables, stoves, propane tanks, metal boxes full of pots and pans, lanterns, utensils and all the ingredients for your meals are carried up the beach. Then you get to "go shopping" on the rafts using a bucket, searching in the produce crates and coolers for the ingredients for your planned meal. Then it's a race with the sun to try to make the meal as quickly as you can because everyone is hungry and wants to eat.

But it is also an incredibly rewarding experience. Firstly, this is the Grand Canyon! It is the most beautiful kitchen in the world! The golden light of dusk dances in the reflection on the surface of the river as it flows past, the towering walls of stone up above, sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes green. Some camps have streams flowing down the middle, others lead back into side canyons, ancient creek beds that carved their own mini Grand Canyons. The air is clean and smells like campfire or blossoms. Furthermore, the whole group has worked up an appetite together every day. Any food is good food at the end of a long day on the river. In the real world, we often take meals for granted, but in the Canyon, every bite is a revelation. That said, my group, TEAM VEGAN, led by me and Ashley, sometimes took the camping gourmet idea a little too far. We made feasts that led our group on a tour around the world: First we did Chinese, then Mexican, Thai, Indian and finished it off with a European feast based around 5-mushroom stroganoff and roasted pumpkin. But boy, was the food good! An example of when we went overboard, here is our Indian menu:
Basmati Rice with Bay Leaves
Aloo Jeera (Potatoes with cumin seeds)
Cabbage Thoran (Cabbage with mustard seeds and grated coconut)
Gingered Cauliflower Curry
Vadouvan Dal (Red lentils with garlic and chiles)
And for dessert:
Giant Cowboy Cookie 

It was St. Patrick's Day when we made that meal and everyone was passing around a bottle of Irish whiskey, with a crate of Guinness by the campfire. By the time I finished cooking, by lantern light, all the Irish alcoholic beverages were gone! I enjoyed my Indian food with a Budweiser. But no regrets... deliciousness was enjoyed by all, and I know the non-vegans of the group left knowing that vegan food can be scrumptious and very satisfying as well as healthy.  I am already thinking about my next trip to the GFC (Grand Fucking Canyon!) and cooking in my favorite kitchen in the world.