Dryad Soup: Lentil-Barley Mushroom Brew

I served this dryadic sylvan soup in walnut shells and garnished it with lichen. It was tricky rounding up conch shells in which to serve the mermaid salad (dulse, wakame, and kale in sesame oil), but I had no difficulty collecting baby-seal eyelashes for the dressing, what with all the offshore drilling. Sigh. The dryads are tapping their wooden fingers together, and furrowing their shagbark brows.

Actually, it was just a sackful of grungy mushroom culls that inspired this soup -- those, and a ratty little sprig of marjoram. Add that toothsome chewy thing I love so much about barley, a splash of maple syrup and a handful of French lentils, and you have what the housemates lauded as "the best housemeal yet." M. Sergeivich ate with a handcarved wooden spoon I purchased with a loaf of my homemade bread in West Virginia. Does that count as a walnut shell? What if I had a loaf of my spelt baguette warming in the oven, and some creamy grassfed yogurt to plop on top of the soup? Some coconut bourbon truffles for dessert?

If you don't serve the soup with yogurt (which would be very unfortunate), the entire menu is, incidentally, vegan.

Dryad Soup

Brown a chopped onion in the bottom of your soup pot. Add two quarts of water, a chopped carrot, a couple stalks of chopped celery, and a few chopped tomatoes; bring to a simmer. Stir in 1 cup French green lentils and 1 cup pearl barley. Simmer till barley and lentils are soft, about an hour. Make several tablespoons of whole-wheat roux* with coconut oil and add to the soup along with a couple tablespoons of sea salt, a few grinds of black pepper, a splash of maple syrup and honey or molasses if you are so inclined. Meatless soups require a lot of tasting and adjusting: they never have that rich mouthfeel or perfect caramelly quality, so mimic it with acids and sugars and rich roux. A couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, generous swizzles of honey, and you're good to go. So long as you serve it with yogurt.

Twenty minutes before serving, add 5 cloves crushed and minced garlic, 3 cups chopped assorted mushrooms (I used shiitake, cremini, and a lone fraying portobella), and half a dozen sprigs of spritely fresh herbs: thyme and marjoram, for example.

Serve with rich yogurt.

*You know, heat several tablespoons fat in the skillet, add an equal quantity of flour, stir about while it bubbles and gilds a bit, and then drop it in the broth.

How to Know When You're Pregnant with Bean Soup

Perhaps you'll know from the moment you awake and don't want to disturb the cat on your feet. Perhaps the rain on your bike helmet will be a little too loud. By midmorning you'll find yourself soaking a couple of pounds of navy beans in four times their volume of water. After work, you'll drain, rinse, and put them to simmer in a great big pot (with fresh water -- the digestive advantage in soaking your beans will be lost if you don't change the water!). You'll add the tomatoes -- lots! -- and starting browning several onions in another skillet in plenty of butter or olive oil. If you're not cooking for your vegan friends, throw in all those ham bones you've been collecting in the freezer. Be careful not to add anything salty (like salty canned tomatoes) till the beans are cooked; salt toughens bean skins so they take longer to get soft and then split when they do.

When the beans are well on their way to done, add the well-caramelized onions and chopped carrots, celery, and garlic, and anything about to die in the crisper. Then go reconnoiter the spice cabinet.

I'm sure it's not a new analogy, but mixing spices is a lot like mixing paints. Sometimes you get purple and sometimes you get off-gray. Too many flavors "confuse" the palate. There are some wonderfully complicated, even baroque exceptions; namely, Indian cooking, and rainy day soups. It helps, of course, to have some sort of theme in mind. I like smoky red things like paprika and chipotle in my bean soup, maybe a little tangy sumac and green stuff like sage, oregano, and thyme. Grind black pepper on everything. Remember: when all those poor mercenaries died in the Crusades, they weren't dying for the grail or gods. It's always been all about pepper.

When the beans are really soft, it's time to go into labor. First check the texture of the soup. If it's too thin, pour some of the broth into another sauce pan to increase the total surface area, and boil both pots to the desired consistency. Next, add several tablespoons each of salt, molasses (or brown sugar), and cider vinegar. Thirdly, assess the "mouthfeel" of the broth. If there are bones in it, they'll add that nice silky gelatin finish, but if it's vegan, you'll need to add something saturated, like coconut oil. Fats mellow and blend flavors, so if the acid gets out of hand, counter it with fat -- just the way salts and sweets counter each other. Taste and edit wildly-- this is the fun part! Remember to cleanse your palate with wine between each tasting. Consult with your housemate -- she'll be your midwife. Taste again. If it just needs something ineffable, keep adding the sweets, salts, sours and fats till a spoonful of the broth is like ten cats on your bed, fifty good books, and a hundred thousand steaming cups of tea.

Vegans: Bones add savor from sodium & other minerals, and a nice rich texture from their gelatin content. The clever vegan will remember to add extra extra salt and swirl in a goodly-sized chunk of coconut oil at the end to make up for the absence of bones.

Serve your baby with cornbread for the complementary protein synergy. (Complementary proteins: grains & dairy, beans & rice, corn & beans, pie & ice cream, wine & cheese, coffee & cigarettes).

Vegan Pear Pie

So yesterday when I made my old standby apple pie, I also baked a skilletful of pie for my vegan/lactose-intolerant friends. No butter. No hydrogenation. I've tried Earth Balance before, but found it made a rather rancid-flavored pie. I turned to my favorite dairy substitute: coconut.

I froze 1/2 c. coconut oil in a little dish, and then shaved it into a pint of (salted) flour. I added the usual amount of water (enough to make a ball), and rolled it out into a bottom crust for a #9 cast-iron skillet. Coconut oil, unfortunately, is composed of fat crystals that are all of the same size. Butter has fat crystals of lots of different sizes, which means that it softens and melts gradually. Coconut oil, on the other hand, is more like water: it's hard, or it's liquid. This makes it a capricious & wily ingredient for things like pastry dough: if it melts all the way into the dough, you have no flakes, but if it stays in hard lumps, you have a heavy pie crust with holes in it where big fat lumps used to be. The bumps should be soft enough to give when you roll out the dough. By the time I was done rolling it out, the coconut oil was definitely liquefying, leaving me with a sticky dough. I just hurried myself up and got it in the fridge again quickly as I could.

For the filling, I mixed 1/2 c. rapadura sugar, 3 T. cornstarch, the juice of half a lemon, and 6 c. chopped pears.

I topped the pie with a streusel made from 1 c. flour, 1/2 c. rapadura, 1 c. shredded coconut, and 1/2 c. coconut oil. In retrospect, the coconutty flavor disappears from the crust during the baking, so there was no need for me to develop the coconut theme any further in the streusel. I should have left out the shredded coconut.

Also, I realized too late that the ripest pears had already seduced my housemates, and I had to bake with crunchy unripe pears -- lame!

It was delicious anyhow. The crust had a rich flavor and flakes enough to satisfy me -- but didn't brown as well without those milk sugars.

The Oldest-fashioned Bread

I put a bunch of enzymes to work three days ago. They've been slaving away for me in my kitchen, spinning starch into sugar and unlocking secret stores of nutrients.

I first made sprouted wheat bread last fall, when I needed something besides cranberries to sustain H. Rose and me on a cranberry-picking backpacking trip. Its dense texture -- caramelized crust and moist interior -- utterly enchanted us, especially paired with the oily melting sharp cheddar we'd packed along.

The process is simple. Soak hard wheat berries (red wheat really shines, but white works, too) one morning in plenty of filtered water. At nightfall, drain them, and depending on the temperature of your kitchen, they might have little sprouts the next morning or evening, or even later. The white sprout should be about 1/3 the length of the grain, but don't be fooled by the skinny little rootlets which are longer and wigglier than the true sprout. If the berries sprout too much, the enzymes will eat all the starch and turn it into sugar -- and good luck making bread from pure sugar. If they don't sprout enough, the bread will not be magic.

Once they are perfect, put them through a meat grinder with some dates -- about half a cup per pint of sprouts. You'll have to grind the whole mess several times over, and the more consistent the texture, the better your bread shall be. Unfortunately, I left my old meat grinder in Virginia, and the one I found here is not nearly as thorough.

Knead the sticky mess, and let it sit for a while. Of course it isn't going to rise, but because it's so full of magic germinating energy, and might catch some wild yeasts from the air, that I do let it rest. Anyhow. gluten always likes to take beauty rests to stay strong & elastic.

I shape the dough into little oblong loaves, maybe two inches tall and the size of my hand with my thumb tucked under, and let the loaves sit a bit before slashing them thrice with a sharp knife and putting them in a slow oven for a couple of hours. When your whole house smells like honey and hay. and the loaves are crusty and deeply colored, you may pull them from the oven. They soften up if you wrap them and store them somewhere cool for several days, but I don't know anybody who can resist fresh bread.

H. Rose adds that she likes her loaves crusty, and once when her oven was too hot, they were really hard, and really good.

Wacky Cake vs. Chicken Shit

I come from a long line of women who wash their saran wrap and reuse coffee filters -- for coffee that's been cut with chicory. My take on this heritage of thrift can be economically expressed with the following Poor-Richardesque maxim: real privation breeds innovation, but miserliness breeds mold.

For example, there was a time when poultry and eggs were expensive commodities. So my foremothers raised their own or, when birthday time came around (11 times a year) invented eggless Wacky Cake. Innovation. Nowadays chicken is cheap because we've developed sufficient technology to cut our chicken with shit. Miserliness.

(A chef I worked for in Seattle refused to eat chicken because in culinary school he learned it could legally contain 7% shit by weight. I think he was full of it himself. Sure, a lot of chickens are treated unethically and taste bad, but chicken shit is fragrant enough you'd think we'd notice. And once I saw him pop a bite of chicken when he didn't think I was looking. But the Russians have weighed in on his side).

In any case, we've all got a couple of vegan housemates or Depression-era great-aunts who want their chocolate cake minus the eggs. And that's when you whirl into the kitchen and whip up Wacky Cake: the Retro-Vegan Wonder. My Mama used to make it for my birthday, decorated with a streublich-looking coconut cream cheese icing and wild roses. I also recommend it with peanut butter, but that goes for most everything.

In one large bowl, whisk together 3 c. flour (whole-wheat or spelt or whatever), 1.5 c. sugar (or your favorite sweetener -- I've used a smaller volume of agave nectar with success), 1 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking soda and cocoa powder to taste. My old recipe calls for 3 T, but that's borderline miserly. I like 1/3 c., or else melted dark chocolate added with the liquids.

Add the liquids to the bowl: 2/3 c. cooking oil (try coconut oil or even olive oil -- the tang tends to cook out just fine), 2 T. vinegar (yes, vinegar), and 1 T. vanilla. Pour 2 c. water on top and stir it all together. Toss it in a greased 9 x 13" pan and bake 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.