Treat yourself to an inspiring evening filled with music, vegan hors d'oeuvres, organic wine and spirits, cruelty-free silent auction items, dancing, and an awards ceremony at Mercy For Animals' upcoming Celebrating Compassion Gala.
The Gala will be held in Chicago, IL on 12/5 and Columbus, OH on 12/6. So come and celebrate and bring your meat eating friends to show them how they can change their lives.
While searching the web for veganblogs that I could link to, I found a great site that has a large list of blogs, both food-centric and non-food centric. It's called VegBlogs. You can add you own vegan blog by joining the site, which I highly recommend. Take a look at their site and read their about page to learn more.
This is a wonderful dish, and despite the dried chilies, it's not too hot. But if you don't like really spicy food, then cut back the chilies to 1 or 1 1/2.
Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of it, but if you make it, you'll see that it turns out really nice.
In a small skillet over medium low heat, toast sesame seeds and whole dried chilies until the sesame seeds turn several shades darker. In a mortar and pestle or in a spice mill of coffee grinder, mix toasted ingredients (may turn out oily from sesame seeds and hence not a powder—don’t worry).
Cook
In a pan or skillet, heat oil and fry mustard seeds until they start to pop. Add onion and garlic and fry until onion softens and becomes translucent. Add a few teaspoons of curry mix and stir to incorporate well and then several pinches of salt. Add cabbage and fry for a minute, then add some water (¼ to ½ cup) and allow cabbage to simmer. Add water as needed so that the mix doesn’t dry out—you want to soften the cabbage. Server over rice or with pita bread or Nan.
Chana Dahl Masala is probably one of my favorite Indian dishes. Well, it's hard to say because I there are so many vegan Indian dishes that I love. But this is one I frequently make. It might look a little complicated, but once you've made it a few times it will seem very simple. The trick here is to make sure that you have fresh spices.
I serve this with brown or white (brown is better for you) Basmati rice, which is something I really love. There is nothing quite like the smell of Basmati rice when it's being cooked in a rice maker.
Ingredients:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (or less for lower fat)
1 can (14.5 oz) of chickpeas, drained and rinsed thoroughly, or a half cup of dried chickpeas soaked in water overnight, then cooked in pot with 3 cups water until soft (about ½ to ¾ hours of cooking—no need to do this with canned chickpeas).
1 medium onion, diced
3 to 4 cloves garlic with a ½ inch piece of fresh ginger, mashed together (chopped finally or put into a food processor and made into a paste—it’s good to actually make a lot of this to use in curry preparation, so use lots of ginger and lots of garlic 1:1 ratio in a food processor)
1 can (15 oz) or crushed tomatoes or two tomatoes skinned1 and crushed in a food mill or by hand with a fork in a bowl
Add mustard seeds and cumin seeds and wait until they begin to pop, which takes a few seconds--but make sure you're pan is hot. As soon as the seeds start to pop, throw in onions and the garlic/ginger paste that you made, and fry until onions sweat and turn soft--do not cook the onions to the point where they begin to caramelize (turn brown).
Add the madras curry powder and optional chili powder until onions are covered and mix becomes fragrant (20 to 30 seconds of stirring). Then add crushed tomatoes and a little water and stir well, making a nice gravy.
Keep stirring for a few minutes, cover and let simmer for ten minutes (add only a little water if it gets too dry looking).
Add the chickpeas, a little more water if necessary, and cover again lowering the heat. Allow to simmer about 15 minutes.
Remove from heat, toss in chopped cilantro and serve over rice and with warm pita bread or even better, Indian Nan.
Tips:
If you have a pan screen put that over it or face the pan slightly up and away from you.
One of the things that I really like about Indian food is the immense variety of flavors. When making some dishes, a key ingredient is garam masala, or hot spice, where hot refers to high temperature. Of course most garam masala recipes I've tried tend to have a nice spicy-hot flavor, which is why whe I cook with it I don't use as much a recipe indicates.
This garam masala recipe is one that I find easy to make and very flavorful. And while it might seem a lot of work to make what appears to be a small amount, a little goes a long way. So here is the recipe from my recipe archives. While I find recipes online and in books, I tend to play around with them and try to add my own touch to them.
Garam masala is a mix of spices whose prime ingredient is cinnamon and is used to flavor a lot of vegetable curries.
Toast all ingredients in a small skillet over medium-low heat for several minutes until mix becomes fragrant and seeds turn several shades darker, but not burnt (try doing this at first on a small amount so you get the hang of it).
Grind in spice mill or coffee grinder (note that once you mix spices in a coffee grinder once, never again use it for coffee—I have several coffee grinders, one for coffee the other for spice mixes). Store the spice mix in an air-tight container in the fridge for a month or place in freezer for up to a year.
Today I was watching the food network and thinking how disappointed I was that they aren't vegan-friendly and their coverage of vegetarian topics and recipes is very much lacking. But, to be fair, some of the programs do make a point, albeit seldomly, to present some vegetarian dishes, or at the very least, mention how one can convert a dish to be vegetarian. And more recently they have begun to add more vegetarian recipes to their web site. For fun, however, I enjoy watching and trying to figure out how I could convert various recipes into vegan recipes. For example, it seems to be easy to think of ways to "veganize" pasta and rice dishes.
The particular food network show that I had been watching is called Throwdown with Bobby Flay. He was trying to outdo in a jerk chicken throwdown the cookbook and children's book author, Angela Shelf Medearis. Among her works is a book titled The Ethnic Vegetarian. I am not reviewing the book here because I have only read the Amazon.com excerpt. But when I heard about this book on the show, I was surprised to discover that Medearis herself is not a vegetarian--hence the jerk chicken. Her other cookbooks are not vegetarian books, which is not to say that they contain no vegetarian recipes, because they do. In fact, if you read their reviews at Amazon and browse their contents, you'll find some vegetarian recipes.
So as I contemplated this I wondered. Is it not hypocritical for an author who is not a vegetarian to write a cookbook on vegetarian food? To me this did seem hypocritical. But as I wrote this I realized that I was sounding ridiculous. Certainly it's alright if she does. But what if the book contains not only information about vegetarian nutrition, but also espouses the virtues of a vegetarian diet diet in regards to it being cruelty free? This is what seemed to me to be hypocritical, but because I haven't read her book to know if she writes on the ethical topic of being vegetarian, I decided instead to engage myself in a smal thought experiment (my favorite pastime) about a hypothetical author and her cookbooks.
So, would it be hypocritical, then, if this was the case? But more importantly, as an ethical vegan, should one purchase such books? If I purchased this hypothetical vegetarian cookbook which, according to some reviewers, had a number of vegan recipes, would I not be supporting someone who exploits animals by writing about non-vegetarian food as well as consuming it?
I think that I would be a hypocrite if I bought this book, and I think it would be ethically wrong to do such a thing. I think that by contributing money to an author like this that I, indirectly, would be encouraging her to do more of the same. But I wonder, what do other people think about this? Certainly if one tried to live his life by conforming totally to Ahimsa (a Sanskrit word meaning non-violence), he would probably become a hermit living in the woods or a cave wearing only hemp, eating only those things that caused no harm to animal or insect alike. He might very well stop shaving and cutting his hair so that he wouldn't have to disturb the critters living in his beard and hair; perhaps he might even stop bathing.
But regardless of the degree of veganism and non-violence you decided to practice, ask yourself this: do you want to be a hypocrite or a hermit or something in between?
Well, the pizza we made from the dough turned out okay, but the crust was thin and doughy. I discovered afterward that what I needed to do was to let it proof for about 8 hours in an oiled glass bowl with a damp towel over it before putting in the refrigerator. The dough will apparently grow between two to three times its size. While the dough was pliable, it was still a little dense. So I will have to create another batch of dough and experiment. This sort of experimentation is turning out to be a lot of fun.
To raise funds for Mercy For Animals vegans and animal lovers everywhere are invited to the Celebrate Compassion Gala '08. Here is what is going to happen there, which looks like it will be a lot of fun:![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vE8S_VoYsopQTu1sgFCyU2GxdBn5G7wwuXCB8ZA8AxpVI2Y-wwDASewGmnYs3nDVd6wRXRMB6zGnyUZPJHcyg5cEOxEk2sV72OwXbk5tHTj1N3iEj1k3IOMvpXOlv1NSFmNoSSMMjg1b5kwVZjxkQ=s0-d)
