Purple Cabbage Salad

I'm a little wary of coleslaws. Perhaps it's unfair, but it's true. Maybe it's the fact that so many coleslaws are ruined by the copious amounts of mayonaise people add, (a plight shared by potato salad) but this cabbage salad won my heart. Its vegan, and colourful, and delicious. And did I mention toasted almonds? And currents? And that it lasts all week, and makes a great lunch? It's pretty much perfect, in my books.

I first found this recipe on Vegan Yum Yum - pretty much my favorite vegan cooking blog out there, although sadly, it looks like you can only access cached versions of the website. So by posting this recipe here, maybe I'm saving it from the ether?

Purple Cabbage Salad with Currants, Carrots, and Almonds

Makes 4-6 Servings

1 Small Head Purple Cabbage, about the size of a softball
4 Carrots, shredded
Sliced or Slivered Almonds, toasted
Dried Currants or Raisins
Dressing

2 Tbs Balsamic Vinegar
4 Tbs Seasoned Rice Vinegar
2 Tbs Water
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Sugar
2 tsp Maple Syrup
4 Tbs Canola Oil

Combine and mix all the ingredients for the dressing. Remove any dry looking outer leaves from the cabbage, and finely shred the rest. A knife works just fine for this, but I also like using a hand held peeler - a trick I learned travelling in Poland, where they know everything there is to know about cabbage. It shreds the cabbage much finer then you can with a knife, which is nice for those of us who don't have a mandolin. Add as many toasted almonds, currents or raisins as you like - I like lots.

Enjoy!

Strawberry Balsamic Shrub

Ok, I know I'm not the first person to say this - but I've fallen in love with shrubs.

I was a bit slow to catch on. When friends started raving about drinking fruit vinegars, I'll admit, I was doubtful. Because you know, I clean with vinegar. Drinking it seems a bit strange, right?

Let me be the first to admit that I was wrong. Shrubs are the singular most delicious thing to happen to my face in a long time. It's like drinking summer. The taste is fruity and dry, and just a tiny bit tart, and so good.

Shrubs might be the newest internet stars, but they're hardly new players. They have a long history in Europe, waaay back before summer fruits were available year 'round, before refrigerators, when people were doing everything they could to preserve the tastes of summer for the long winter ahead. 

There seem to be an endless variation of shrub recipes, using any number of fruit, vinegar, and spice combinations. Our favorite so far is a strawberry balsamic vinegar shrub, which is super easy to make and pretty much caused a revolution in my mouth. Really, its that good.

Strawberry-Balsamic Shrub

2 cups strawberries (I think we caught the very last Farmers Market strawberries. hurry!)
2 cups sugar
1 cup apple cider vinager
1 cup balsamic vinager

1. Remove the stems from the strawberries and cut them in quarters.
2. Combine the strawberries and sugar, and mash them together with a potato masher to release some of the juice from the strawberries.
3. Store the mixture in the fridge overnight.
4. Add the vinegars, and give it a stir. Leave this mixture in a sealed mason jar on your counter for a few days.
5. Strain out the fruit, and voila! Shrub.
6. Combine the shrub syrup with soda water (vodka is nice too) to taste. Serve over ice.
(I would guess that I like a 5:1 ratio of shrub to soda water, personally - but play with it and see what you like.)

 (here is our strawberry balsamic shrub, posing with a raspberry shrub - which was also delicious)

Enjoy! 

Apple Cider

So recently, it came to light that a co-garden member had made his own apple cider press, and (having pressed all the apples he could) was willing to lend it out. Apple cider is awesome - especially with cinnamon and spiced rum - and so we quickly put our name on the list, and a plan was born.


Now, someone back in Peterborough's history clearly loved apples, and to this day there are apple trees growing all over the place, if you know where to look. No one I know here buys apples in the fall. Its wonderful.

We picked up lots of apples from the ground (which traditionally, are the apples you would use for cider), but couldn't resist doing some tree climbing. The apples were smaller then the ones you would buy from the store, but they were sweet, and awesome, and free. I think we filled every bucket and pot in the house with apples - and barely made a dent in the tree. We did a quick wash of all the apples in the bathtub, and then moved into serious apple cider production.

I cannot underscore how badass this cider press is. It had two main parts, a garborator, which is used to munch up the apples into a fine pulp, and a bin, where the actual pressing happens in a few stages: a) wrap the pulp in muslin bags, maybe 5 of them. b) sandwich those bags between plexiglass sheets (cutting boards, it turns out, works too). c) put your pulp/plexiglass many layered sandwich in your large bin, and d) stand on top of the sandwich and watch the apple cider pour out. There was originally a tire jack for this purpose, but no one could figure out how to use it, so we substituted human body weight instead.

Aaand it was that easy! Apple cider = apples, mushed up and squeezed. Presto.

Ok, so it wasn't pretty. It was actually a total disaster (the awesome kind). I could barely take this photo because my hands were so sticky (and the floors, and the walls..) and there was pulp flying everywhere. Unfortunately, non of the photos I took of the pressing process even remotely turned out. It might have been the pulp, the laughing, or the copious amounts of beer we were drinking at the time. It was a pretty glorious mess. But isn't that what the best projects are all about?

In the end, we made about ten gallons of apple cider. I'm not sure why, but our cider turned out strangely velvety - much more so then the apple cider you buy in stores. It could be because we were drinking it unpasturized, or maybe it was because of our somewhat unconventional pressing techniques. Either way, I like it!

About half of the cider headed home with friends of ours to become hard apple cider, and we made some of ours into apple cider molasses (post to come!), the rest we canned in a hot water bath for about ten minutes, with two tablespoons of lemon juice - so that even in the darkest days of winter, there will be hot apple cider and rum.

Kimchi

Kimchi is one of those foods that I find most people have a strong opinion about. My father, for instance, wont be in the same room as an open container of kimchi if he can help it. I couldn't disagree more. I love kimchi.

While its easy enough to buy kimchi in Peterborough, most of the store bought kimchi I've found has fish oil in it - and I cook for enough vegans that this can be a real pain. Besides, this recipe is so good, and SO easy, there's really no reason to buy it.

You'll need:

Head of napa cabbage - about one pound
Sea salt
Water
Red chili flakes
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
3-4 green onions, sliced
1/2 yellow onion
1/2 ripe apple
1/2 ripe pear

1. First,  separate the cabbage leaves and chop them up, into roughly bite sized pieces.

2. Dissolve a quarter cup of sea salt in a big bowl half full of warm water, then pour salt water over cabbage leaves. Give cabbage a gentle toss to distribute salt water. Allow salted cabbage to sit for at least four hours, or overnight. The cabbage doesn't need to be covered in water - just tossed in it.

3. Give the cabbage a good rinse to remove excess salt, then transfer cabbage to a large bowl.

4. Combine a quarter cup of fine red chili flakes with warm water, stir gently with a spoon to create a red chili paste, then transfer chili paste to cabbage.

5. Add minced garlic, minced ginger, and the green onions.

6. Blend yellow onion, apple, and pear with one cup of water, then add this natural sweetener to the cabbage.

7. Put on a pair of plastic gloves and give everything a thorough toss and rubdown. You want to evenly distribute all ingredients, especially the red chili paste.

8. Transfer seasoned cabbage leaves into glass jars. Be sure to use firm pressure with your hands to push down on cabbage leaves as they stack up inside the bottle.

Transfer any liquid that accumulated during the mixing process into the bottle as well - this liquid will become kimchi brine. Some liquid will also come out of the cabbage leaves as you press down on them as they are stacked in the bottle.

Be sure to leave at least an inch of room at the top of the bottle before capping it loosely* with a lid, and allow the kimchi to ferment at least 24 hours before you eat it. Some sights recommend refrigerating the kimchi at this point to slow down the fermentation process, but we usually leave it out to keep fermenting, and eat it over the course of a month or so.

* Although its never happened to me, a reader commented that she had jar explode on her after capping a lid too tight! So I've changed the original instructions - cap loosely my friends!!

Ed: If you're wondering what to do with your kimchi, check out this recipe for kimchi fried rice!

Ketchup!

Remember that time I was talking about how my house has been completely inundated with tomatoes, and they're filling up all the bowls in the house and more just keep coming? Talk about champagne problems, right?

I only seem to be complaining though, because its forced us to think of all kinds of creative things to do with tomatoes. We canned them. We dried them. We made them into paste. We made them into salsa, and shakshuka sauce, and canned those. Last week I made tomato jam, which I forgot to document for the blog but which I not cannot stop eating. Now, there's ketchup.

I don't usually eat ketchup. (Unless, like, we're camping and then all bets are off). But this ketchup is a revelation. Its sweet and a bit spicy, and tastes like cinnamon and cloves and a million other things you can't quite place. It tastes like the ketchup I am familiar with but is infinitely better. There is way more going on in this ketchup then in your traditional Heinz 57.

And really, if you'll forgive me a rant, when you start cooking things yourself this keeps happening. You try your creation, say for example, ketchup. You pause for a moment to appreciate. Then you look back at the crap they pass off at ketchup in the grocery stores (which is all corn syrup and color) and you're like, what the hell? Maybe you feel like you've been lied to, all this time.. But I digress.

Most of the ketchup recipes we found online contained Worcestershire sauce, which as it turns out, contains anchovies and thus, isn't vegetarian. We feed a lot of vegetarians around here, so we had to stray somewhat off the beaten path.

You need:
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 large onion, chopped
10 cups chopped tomatoes
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2-3 tbsp molasses
2-3 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 whole head of garlic, roasted
2 hot chili peppers, chopped
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
2 cloves, whole
2 tbsp tamarind paste
olive oil (to fry onions/toast spices - maybe 2 tbsp?)
2 lovage sprigs (optional, or use celery)
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp salt

1. Fry mustard seeds until they stop popping, add crushed cloves, coriander, cumin - remove from heat.
2. Put all the spices in a coffee grinder/food mill and grind to a powder.
3. Fry onion until lightly browned, add hot peppers.
4. Put the onions and peppers in a pot with the tomatoes, then add all of the other ingredients except for the lovage and the bay leaf.
5. Cook for 10 minutes, then blend with an immersion blender.
6. Add bay leaf and lovage/celery stalks, cook for 1/2 an hour. Remove lovage leaf/celery stalk.
7. Cook for another 90 minutes, or until it looks sufficiently ketchupy.

If you plan to can the ketchup, add it to sterilized mason jars and immerse in a hot water bath for 35 minutes (for pint jars).