Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

Last week’s Who Cooked It Better aroused quite the display of passion in you folks, finally giving America’s pissed-off vegans a chance to vent their frustrations against that scourge of vegans everywhere, Anthony Bourdain. This was Endless Simmer’s most popular poll to date, and with 800 of you weighing in, Hezbollah Tofu crushed Anthony Bourdain, 83 to 17 percent. Many congrats to HT on a truly winning original recipe.

In a shameless ploy to hold on to our newly expanded vegan readership base, we’re continuing with the “hold the bacon” theme for this week’s Who Cooked It Better, a search for the ultimate veggie burger. But before you meat-lovers tune out, let’s remember that grillin’ season is just around the corner, and if you expect to keep your veggie friends around for the summer, you better have a good faux-burger recipe. And don’t say, “Oh, I already know about Boca Burgers,” because when your vegan friends respond “that’s so considerate of you to think of me,” what they really mean is “Great. I can’t wait to eat this same store-bought patty every weekend for the rest of the summer. By the way, I’m a vegan and this has cheese in it.”

Seeing as how veggie burgers are kind of an anti-establishment thing anyway, we decided to go all-blogger for this challenge. Our first cheftestant is Swell Vegan, whose tasty-looking seitan burger (top left) is accented with chopped sesame seeds, red pepper and carrots. In a twist that could have you choosing this over steak at your next BBQ, Swell Vegan mixes chimichurri sauce into the veggie patty, and tops it off with more of this savory green stuff, along with tomato, onion, and tofutti cheese. SV says the recipe is still a work in progress, but this one already looks like a winner.

Moving to the top right, Eat Air is hoping to take down yet another meat-worshiping TV star with their veganized version of Paula Deen’s Big Mike Burger. The Big V replaces Paula’s butter burger/pecan burger double patty with an amped up seitan burger that includes shittake mushrooms and vegan cheese, along with a tempeh-pecan patty complete with maple syrup and liquid smoke (!) Complete directions here.

On the bottom right corner is a beautiful pic from 101 Cookbooks, whose use of eggs may turn off you vegan voters, but these garbanzo bean-cilantro-sprout burgers are so tasty looking we had to include them. Most originally, 101 C loses the bread buns altogether and uses her two patties as the buns, filling the inside with avocado slices, cipollini onions, and more. Full recipe over at 101 Cookbooks.

In the bottom-left corner is a great-looking burger from The Accidental Vegetarian, which looks most like a real burger of anything we could find, even though instead of fake meat, the AV goes for a mix of eggplant, zucchini, onion and garlic, kicked up a notch with an inventive almond paste concoction. Full recipe here.

Your votes and thoughts please…

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ps - did we miss any of the best? Let us know!

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I know, lame title. Total cop-out. My bad.

Like Evo Diva has ranted before, I like to vary my meals between bloody steaks and salad greens laced with whole grains and vegetables. 80, my normal dining partner however, still likes to see a cut of meat on his dinner plate. So it took all of my debate team skills to convince him to eat a totally vegetarian dinner.

Oh, and I’m totally lying. I just think it would sound cool if I actually knew how to win an argument by debate skills. I actually spent my after school hours playing field hockey in the fall, lacrosse in the spring and watching my then-boyfriend play video games in the winter.

Anyway, as I pride myself in keeping a well-stocked pantry, on my walk home from work (with 80) I tried to piece together a meal without having to go to the store for anything. And I almost made it. After I decided to make a lasagna, but with eggplant strips instead of noodles (thanks, Vi), the only way I could sell 80 on the idea was to stop by the store so we could cover the whole thing with mozzarella cheese.

Real quick on the eggplant, so I bought it to use for this DC food bloggers potluck. But I was too hung over and just couldn’t get it together, especially after belmontmedina was bailing. Luckily, though, Mr. So Good filled me in on some of the details. I promise to be a better part of the community and attend the next one - headache and all.

Read on for what I guess I could have made if I wasn’t playing flip cup like a 20 year old the night before.

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I first discovered halloumi cheese in South Africa last year. A trendy SA chain called News Cafe serves an avocado salad with fried halloumi, grilled brinjal and peppadews. Since I didn’t know what any of those things were, I had to try it. I ended up making several return trips for this amazing fried cheese.

For the record, brinjal is just eggplant, and peppadew is a spicy red pepper native to South Africa. But that’s beside the point, because halloumi was the real discovery. This super-salty, extra-firm-but-slimy goat/sheep’s milk cheese is actually from Cyprus, and if you try to say otherwise, the Halloumi Police will get you.

I’m not sure why it’s so prevalent in South Africa, but I have never noticed it stateside before, so when I spied it at the co-op last week, I jumped for it.

In taste, it’s probably most similar to a queso blanco, and like that Mexican cheese, it’s most exciting because it can be fried or grilled. A few recipes around the web recommend dipping it in flour, but I just tried it straight up and got this nice golden brown after frying thin slices for about a minute each side in extra virgin. The outside is a crisp golden brown and the inside is just a tad melty.

Since I didn’t have any peppadews lying around, I made my own version of the salad, with roasted red peppers, cucumbers, and of course, pine nuts.

*This post is tagged both Greek and Middle Eastern for redundancy’s sake, not as an attempt to fuel any cheese-related territorial conflicts.

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Not that I’ve run out of ideas or anything, but this weekend I decided to revisit a recipe from the ghost of Endless Simmer past. Actually, it was the very first post in ES history, published EIGHT FULL MONTHS AGO! Can you believe it?

Here’s that first post, a brief write-up of my adventures with Eggplant Rollatini.

How embarrassing! I can’t believe I’m even linking to that post. Look at that awful photo choice! The misspellings! The run-on sentence recipe! It’s worse than looking at my 8th grade yearbook.

Well I made this dish again, with some new variations. But since I wasn’t cooking for my healthy, responsible parents this time, you can count on additions of carbs, cheese and plenty of oil.

After the jump, recipe for Eggplant Rollatini 2.0.

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Picking a book for my book club tends to be a slightly contentious undertaking each meeting. Although we are a small group, our different tastes in literature can provide us with a challenge in deciding what to undertake next. While a book club is a great excuse to read and catch up with friends, I also see it as an opportunity to test my culinary skills.

The hostess of each meeting is charged with providing the entire meal for the group. Personally, I love tying my meal to the book as closely as possible. Sometimes this is a daunting undertaking – A Million Little Pieces proved too much for my culinary creativity. Luckily, last month I had Reading Lolita in Tehran as my inspiration. The internets came to my rescue and provided me with an easy, scrumptious stew to serve my book club: Khoresh-E Bademjan.

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I’ve been wanting to make moussaka since way back at Greekfest, but have been avoiding it due to the unending sauna-like weather of the past few months.

Now, I’m not tryin to say I eat only light and airy foods all summer (see: fetuccini alfredo at the beach), but it just hasn’t seemed right to make this very meat-y, very chees-ey warming dish in this kind of heat.

Still, I absolutely love the idea of layering meat with eggplant - it’s just not fair that vegetarians get to have all the eggplant-fun - us meatlovers should be able to get in on the act too.

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As we may have mentioned a few times, the ES crew spent the past week at a beach house in the Outer Banks with 16 or so of our closest friends. 80 proof, gansie and I drove down together because we’re the coolest because no one wanted to hear us rattle on about our blog for 7 hours. And look! We even passed this swimming pool store that makes a pun on our blog name - I had no idea we were so big in the Carolinas.

In addition to such stressful tasks as foosball, lying on the beach, and mixing drinks, we obviously spent plenty of time talking about food and cooking. We have a whole backlog of stories to share, so I thought I would get the ball rolling with this outstanding recipe from our good deep-fried southern friend Thresher. He took the philosophy behind fried green tomatoes and cooked up some eggplant that is deliciously unhealthy enough to make Paula Deen go veggie. Recipe after the jump. FullDis - I guesstimated the measurements after watching Thresher cook it up.

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Not that we’re ever anything less than 100 percent professional around here, but I think it’s time to drop some serious high-class knowledge on this joint. This delicious pic and fantastic recipe for a fresh summertime dish comes via my aunt Sheila, who is married to a French chef, so she def knows what she’s talking about and was eating ratatouille way before it went mainstream.

And of course, hit us up below if you’ve got your own rata-recipe.

Ratatouille (Chef Gerard’s Version)

1 Spanish Onion
4 Cloves garlic
1 Medium Green Pepper
1 Small Red Pepper
4 Medium Tomatoes
2 Medium Zucchini
1 Medium Yellow Squash
1 Small Eggplant
chopped parsley
2 pinches of cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste
2-3 tablespoons Olive Oil

Method:

Peel and slice onions; wash peppers, cut in half, remove seeds and thinly slice. Saute onions and peppers until onions are translucent. Chop garlic and parsley and keep on side.

Line the bottom of a roasting pan, pyrex dish or stainless steel lined copper pan (see photo) with the peppers and onions.

Wash other vegetables and slice in pieces less than 1/4” thick. Arrange by individual vegetable in the roasting pan (dish) in alternating tightly packed rows – almost erect. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, cayenne and olive oil.

Cook on bottom shelf of 350 degree oven for 40 minutes. Remove and add the chopped garlic and parsley to top and put back in middle shelf of oven for 5-10 minutes.

Serve room temperature or cold.

Serves 6 – 8.

Photo courtesy of Paul Bilsky.

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For me, the hardest part about eating has always been making decisions. Our multicultural, food-on-demand society gives us so many options that it’s often difficult to choose. There’s nothing worse than sitting down to a menu with hundred of options and having no idea where to begin (OK, there are probably worse things, but this really pisses me off). That’s why I get stoked about any new innovation that successfully combines more than one great food item, allowing us to, dare I say, eat two birds with one stone.

In the great tradition of vanilla-chocolate-swirl ice cream cones, lemonade-iced tea, and the triple-decker club sandwich, we now have hummus-baba ganoush. It’s OK, take a minute to catch your breath and process that.

Just recently I had a conversation about how it’s impossible to decide whether I like eggplant-y baba ganoush or chickpea-based hummus better. Now I learn The Tribe, the same company that makes all those great flavored hummuses (correct plural? hummusi, maybe?) like dill, roasted garlic, and spicy chipotle, has started producing hummus-baba ganoush. One dip, both great tastes. There’s no info on their website yet, but I swear I had some yesterday, and it really does capture the essence of both dips. Pure genius.

While it may not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just yet, or convince Americans to put down the mayo-heavy spinach dip, my personal little foodie world will never be the same.

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