Guacamole animation

This is my new favorite guacamole recipe. I particularly love the diced onions.

How to Peel a Pumpkin

Pumpkins are not just for carving. They are colorful, chuckfull of vitamins and minerals, and fiber. Best of all, they cost nearly nothing both in price and calories. Not as hard as you think. The important part is to have a stable cutting board, a sharp chef's knife and some elbow oil. Once you have these tools aligned, just watch this video for the tutorial.

Skinny Dipping

That's what she calls her top 10 vegetable dips for hot summer days.

Another Recipe for Variety

My friend made a variation of this salad for lunch one day and I loved it! Made some edits with Dominique to make it "Detox-friendly", and wanted to post it as a suggestion to add some variety to the 2nd week's recipes: Southwestern Bean Salad: 2 cups cooked Quinoa; 2/3 cup dry kidney or black beans, cooked*; 2 cups cooked corn kernels (fresh or frozen); 1 sweet red pepper, chopped; 1 small onion, chopped; 1/2 cup vinegar; 1/4 cup cilantro leaves, chopped; 1 minced jalapeno pepper or cayenne to taste; 1 tsp chili powder. Combine all the ingredients. This tastes even better if you let it stand refrigerated or at room temperature, 1 hour before serving. Makes 6-8 servings.

*Dominique recommends soaking the beans overnight with 1/2tsp of baking soda per cup of beans. Then, in the morning, rinse, put in new water, and soak again for a few hours before cooking. They will cook fast and won't make you gassy. Of course, since I am a spicy wimp, I leave out the jalapeno/cayenne and it is still very tasty :) Enjoy!

Potato chips put on a glitzy evening dress and go to town

My friend Kathryn is a food stylist, photographer, and food writer. I don't know exactly what a food stylist is, but she's a spectacular one. She's started a new web site, including some of her best recipes. I think the most remarkable is Windowpane Potato Chips.

New Recipe Section on the Web Site

We've revamped the recipes page of the web site. We've added a lot more things to cook, and broken them up into seasons. On a cold, rainy, November evening, it did me good to think about summertime vegetables.

We don't have pictures of lots of the new items. If you've cooked them, and have a photo you'd like us to put up, please let us know!

Guajillo Stew

I have a lot of Guajillo peppers growing in the garden, so it was time to clean out the last few dried ones from the kitchen cabinet. Never heard of guajillo peppers? Well, you've certainly eaten them. They're the foundation of the basic chili sauce you put on enchiladas. This is a fairly simple stew, especially good because I didn't have to go to the store. Everything in it was already in the pantry. (The zucchini was a gift from a neighbor; he overlooked it one day and found himself the next morning with a four-pound monster on his vine. He gave it to us because Zizania can cook anything.)

Ingredients:

• 3 dried guajillo chilis
• 1 T oil (soybean, corn, canola, whatever)
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 1 red bell pepper -- seeded and diced
• 1 zucchini, peeled and diced (use a medium-sized one)
• 4 cloves garlic -- minced (I love garlic; you can use less)
• 1 14-oz. can crushed tomatoes
• 1 potato, peeled and diced
• 1 11-oz. can sweet corn, drained
• 1 can chickpeas, drained
• 2 t dried oregano
• 1 ½ t ground cumin
• 1 t salt
• ¼ c red wine
• water

Instructions:

1. Make simple chili sauce. Cut off the stems from the chilis and discard the seeds. Put the chilis in a bowl. Boil a cup of water and pour it over them. Put a smaller bowl on top to keep the chilis under water, and leave them to soak for 20 minutes.
2. In a large pot (I use a dutch oven), heat the oil. Sauté the onion, bell pepper, zucchini, and garlic until the onions turn yellow and the zucchini is tender. Dump the remaining ingredients in the pot, cover with water, and bring to a simmer. Put a lid on the pot.
3. After the chilis have been soaking 20 minutes, put them in a blender and purée the heck out of them. The sauce should look like a thick liquid.
4. Add the purée, reduce heat and cover. Let it cook until the potatoes are tender. (The time depends on how small you diced them.)

A Vegetable Classic from the '80s

"Pass me a plateful, I'll be grateful!"

Taking up the Cudgels

Writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Amanda Hesser takes Michelle Obama to task for saying, “I don’t miss cooking. I’m just fine with other people cooking.” She has some faint praise

for the White House organic garden, but is really ticked off by the idea (out of her own head, as far as I can tell) that Ms. Obama thinks cooking isn't worth doing. Worse yet, she goes on to say, "Because terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less; cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth."

 

I sympathize with Ms. Hesser's motivations, but she's working from total cluelessness. There are two reasons we don't go to New York City to get advice on gardening. One is that they publish ungrammatical sentence fragments. The other is that the whole island of Manhattan is a terrarium, disconnected from life and nature. Ms. Hesser was writing on May 31, the beginning of a four-month period when cooking is totally optional. The garden outside my window is going gangbusters, and not a single thing in it needs to be cooked. She should check out some raw food blogs, or talk to some of these people.

 

For example, this is what I've had for dinner two nights this week:

2 large cucumbers, peeled and sliced

10 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 bell pepper, diced

sprinkling of red wine vinegar

freshly-ground salt and pepper

Mix in a bowl. Eat on the porch, with a big glass of iced tea. (Or a small glass of chianti, if you don't have work to do after dinner.)

Total preparation time, maybe 7-8 minutes picking the vegetables, plus another 5 minutes washing and chopping. No cooking involved. No threat to the stability of the Nation.

 

p.s. The title of this post is taken from a piece by Robert Benchley, which is one of the funniest science articles ever written.

A billion people can't be wrong

Indian food is great. I don't remember how we got by without it. I've read lots of Indian recipes over the years, but when I try to make them in my own kitchen, I'm frequently stumped by their different way of describing things. But now the intertubes have come to my rescue. An Indian cook named Srivasa has a YouTube channel where he records himself cooking. All those strange words become suddenly clear, when you get to see what object he's holding as he gets to the confusing part of the recipe. These videos make me hungry.

Thanks to the ladies at Vegetarian Cuisine for introducing me to this guy.

Diet and Nutrition Improves Pre-diabeties Numbers

After attempting changes in dieting and increasing my exercise program over 12 months, it wasn't until I adopted the Zizania nutrition plan that I began to see my glucose numbers go below 100. I attribute the changes to the personal coaching on a weekly basis with Dominique Hoffman. Through her process you receive direct hands on advice on how to shop and cook meals that taste great with healthy and natural food selections. In addition to the reduction in glucose my weight also dropped by about 10 lbs. I noticed my changes occurred within about a 6-8 week timeframe. The Zizania process has worked extremely well for me and I highly recommend it for anyone looking to improve their health and well being!

Pasta mit Erdnuß

Many years ago, I went on a tour of the Rhineland in Germany. In the pre-internet days, it wasn't so easy to find veg*n restaurants within reach of tourist destinations. It was a rare opportunity when we could even find a salad bar. Now, though, with a few minutes of research, a traveler in Germany isn't doomed to an endless parade of Schnitzel and fries. (OK, actually the fries were uniformly excellent.) And I can keep my (dubious) German skills up to date without traveling. Here's a recipe that's almost identical to one of Zizania's most popular dishes. The seasoning is a bit simpler, but the flavor is international. Zizania also makes it with mushrooms. Guten appetit!

grilled tempeh

this is very easy but it takes time for the marinade to penetrate the tempeh.

• 1 block of tempeh
• juice of 1 ripe lime
• 1 T chili powder
• 1 t garlic powder
• 1 t cider vinegar
• 1/4 rice vinegar or mirin
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 1 garlic clove crushed
• 1 T tequila
• salt and pepper
• 1 T freshly ground cumin
• 1/4 t red pepper flakes

Mix all ingredients except tempeh and put into the shallow rectangular bowl. Cut tempeh into 1/2 in strips. Add the tempeh to the bowl of marinade, cut side down so the sauce penetrates faster. Let stand for 45 minutes, turn the tempeh pieces to soak the other side. Let stand for 1 hour. The sauce should be almost entirely absorbed. Throw on the grill and cook till brown, about 10 minutes on each side. Enjoy as finger food, as an addition to fajitas, or in a pita bread with greens, cucumber and tomato. Or on top of a salad instead of chicken.

Speedy dessert

This recipe takes seconds to prepare and is unforgettable.

• 1 or 2 scoops of vanilla ice cream. I like Rice dream or Soy Joy
• 1 t rum
• 1 T frozen or fresh raspberries

Put the ice cream in a bowl, pour the raspberries on top and pour the rum all over. Bon Appetit!

Tacos for Dinner

Tonight at the Zizania household, dinner is tacos made from refried beans (12 oz.), corn tortillas (12), salsa (half a jar), lettuce from the garden (about 20 leaves), and alfalfa sprouts (1 pkg.). Some hot sauce, added to taste. This is gluten-free, nearly fat-free, guilt-free, and it keeps the Webmaster properly fed.

Corn tortillas seem to be ignored these days. Flour tortillas have taken over. I've recently talked to people who didn't even know there were soft corn tortillas. That's a real shame, because tortillas are the reason ancient Native Americans worked so hard breeding corn. Some of the best food this continent ever produced.

Total meal preparation time was just 20 minutes. That last part was critical -- we were driving all over the mountains today, buying a new brush hog. Sometimes after 8 or 9 hours in the office, I feel tired. Nothing like schlepping 500 lbs. of steel around the countryside, though. Today, easy recipes were mandatory.