Vegan. Girl. Scout. Cookies.

You heard me.

File this one under "information I wish I didn't have."  One of the two manufacturers of Girl Scout cookies makes vegan Thin Mints and something called Thanks-a-lot, which did not exist when I was a Girl Scout but are also vegan.  They also make a version of Tagalongs that are not labelled "vegan", but I didn't see anything non-vegan on the label (maybe it's in the natural or artificial flavors?).  Thanks to The Laziest Vegans in the World, I now have this dangerous information.  And our secretary sells Girl Scout Cookies for her granddaughter's troop every year.

At least they aren't making vegan Samoas -- yet.  That would just be too much to bear.

I know not to expect much from the American Heart Association, but this is really over the top

Check this out -- "Midwestern corn-fed beef," certified by the American Heart Association.  Certified to do what, cause heart attacks?  That's all I've got.  I'm speechless.

When good broths go bad

You all know about the broth bag, right?  You save all your vegetable scraps in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and when it's full you use it to make stock.  Well, I've had a bag in my freezer for a while now, and I want to make some bean and barley chowder this weekend, so I decided to make some broth.  I put the contents of the bag in my biggest slow cooker crock, filled it with water, and left it on High all day.

When I got home from work, I could smell the savory broth the moment I got off the elevator.  It smelled great, and my apartment smelled even better.  I turned off the slow cooker and strained the broth into a storage container.  It was a lovely dark brown, and smelled like onions and other wonderful homemade goodness.

And then I tasted it.  It was bitter.  I tasted it again.  Still bitter.  I tasted it a third time.  Did I want to use this bitter liquid as the base for my chowder?  I did not.  I poured it down the sink.

I'm trying to figure out what went wrong.  Here's what was in the bag:

onions (ends and skins)
garlic (same)
carrot peels
potato peels (just a few)
celery tops and ends
fennel tops
lime rind
squash ends -- summer and winter

I'm thinking either the squash or the lime rind was a mistake.  The other stuff seems benign.  I always use the onion skins in my broth because they make it a pretty color, and I can't remember ever having a problem.

Any ideas?  I had both red and yellow onions in there, but I don't think that can be it.

So I will be making my soup this weekend with Spike broth powder, plus about a cup of bean stock I have languishing in the freezer. Gayelord Hauser was a charlatan, but the broth powder is pretty good.  I'm going to grind up some dried wild mushrooms too, as recommended by America's Test Kitchen, and hope that does the trick.

Carrot log cabins: there's a learning curve

Inspired by yesterday's video about the adventures of a cupcake among the vegetables, I grabbed my smallest paring knife and decided to make my own carrot Lincoln Logs:

It's harder than I thought it would be.  I was having trouble getting the edges straight, and it was hard to cut deep enough without slicing off the end of the carrot.  Maybe an x-acto knife would work better.  I gave up pretty quickly and we ate the evidence with some hummus.

My (grocery) bags are packed, I'm ready to go.

Recently I wrote about how I meet my protein needs when I travel.   On the last trip I took, I didn't bring much food because a) I was flying, and b) I was going to a civilized place (defined as a place with a Whole Foods).  We went to WF several times on that trip, actually.

Well, tomorrow I'm hitting the road for a professional conference.  I'll be gone for three nights, and I know from experience that the town I'm going to -- Ocean City, Maryland -- is a real vegan food desert.  This is especially true in the off season.  There are two restaurants there where I've had decent vegan meals, but I don't know whether either one will be open midweek.  Add in that I'll be very busy trying to act like a grownup, and I won't have my own transportation, and you'll understand why I'm bringing this:

Not the cat.  The cat is staying home.

  

Sweet Corn Bisque with Poblanos

A few days ago I showed off my haul of poblanos from the farmer's market, and said I was thinking of cream of poblano soup.  I wandered around the web looking at recipes (poblano vichyssoise, anyone?), briefly considered just adding some roasted poblanos to the cheezy potato soup from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook,  and finally decided to veganize a recipe from a book I found at the library, Southwest Flavors:  Santa Fe School of Cooking, that I checked out as part of my ongoing love affair with Mexican and New Mexican cuisine.

This is a beautiful book, with lots of pictures, and good information about green chile and other traditional New Mexican ingredients, but it is not a vegan-friendly book.  Almost all the entrees are meat-based, and the few that aren't are heavily dependent on cheese. I marked just a few recipes that were vegan or sounded veganizable (the only actual vegan recipes are for salad and things like salsa), this sweet corn bisque being one of them:

1 T oil (I used less)
1 cup diced yellow onion
3/4 cup diced celery
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup New Mexico green chile, hot or medium, roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped (I substituted roasted poblanos here)
4 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
2 baking potatoes, peeled and diced
5 cups chicken or vegetable stock (I actually used water and some of this Chick'n Style Seasoning powder, because I had some in the pantry and was convinced nooch would be good in this soup, even though the original recipe didn't call for cheese)
1 cup heavy cream Trader Joe's soy creamer (I actually ended up using most of a pint container)
Salt (I think I left this out because there's salt in the chick'n powder)

Saute onion, celery, and garlic.  Add everything  else except the soy creamer and simmer until the potatoes are cooked.  Puree the soup with your ever-loving immersion blender.  Stir in the soy creamer.  Put some soup in a nicely contrasting bowl.

Verdict:  rich and delicious but HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT!  I thought a cup of chile sounded like a lot, and I made the mistake of trusting the recipe instead of my instincts.  I barely made it through my bowl with the help of several corn tortillas; my girlfriend couldn't finish hers.  I decided I had to try to fix the soup, so I cooked 2 more big potatoes and almost 2 pounds of frozen corn in some more chick'n broth, then added it to the original soup and pureed again.  So now we have a huge container of soup, which  is still spicy but is much less of a challenge to eat.

So the moral of the story is, try this soup, but maybe start with 1/4 cup of peppers and increase the amount from there if it isn't spicy enough for your liking.

The kitten thought the soup tasted great when it was still way too spicy for us.  He is so weird.

How to Roast Poblano Peppers and Live to Tell About It

Back in my pregan days, my favorite thing to order at a Mexican restaurant was chile rellenos.  Cheezy, deep-fried goodness, mmmm.  When I saw some poblano peppers at the farmer's market the other week, I impulsively bought them, figuring someone must have come up with a veganized recipe for chile rellenos by now.  I was right.  Google "vegan chile rellenos" and you will come up with many recipe options.  What I hadn't counted on, though, was that veganized chile rellenos are approximately as bad for you as the cow variety.  They're still deep-fried, after all, and while delicious, Daiya cheese is not exactly health food.  I needed to come up with something else to do with the poblanos.

Just about every recipe that doesn't call for stuffing poblanos says to roast them (actually, several recipes call for roasting and then stuffing, which sounds like a frustrating mess when I consider how soft and juicy the peppers get when roasted).  I decided to roast the peppers first and ask questions later.  It occurred to me that I might even be able to use roasted poblanos in place of New Mexico green chile.  Heresy, I know, but I thought that with my unsophisticated chile-eating palate it just might work.