Vegan Avenue – Tres Leches Pancakes
The Beer Plant – Tarrytown Scramble
Miyoko’s Creamery Cultured Vegan Cream Cheese – Fish-Free Lox
Kerbey Lane Cafe – Vegan Harvest Omelet
Conscious Cravings – Eggless Tofu Salad
Chilaquiles Factory – Chilaquiles Verdes
Humpty’s Wall of Breakfast – Tofu Scram-Bowls
Rosh Hashanah without an apple cake would be like Thanksgiving without a pumpkin pie; an unforgivable travesty. Combining the most essential edible harbinger of a sweet new year, you’re practically asking for another 365 days of misfortune if you should overlook this staple. As we turn the page on the year 5781, let’s not leave anything to chance.
Dense with tender fruit and a moist crumb, it’s a homey, humble dessert that’s as soothing to make as it is to eat. Anyone who can wield a spatula will pull out a perfect ring of dark brown cake, aromatic spices infusing the whole kitchen with their sweet bouquet. Fool-proof and crowd-pleasing, this formula has withstood the test of time, rising to the occasion to feed parties big and small. Such a generous cake is an excellent guest itself, perfect to make ahead or keep for days after the event.
Such an easy-going treat would be welcome for any celebration, but is also just as well suited for an everyday simple indulgence.
Confession: I like peanut butter cookies, though try as I might, I simply don’t love them. Their alluring crosshatch imprints do beckon, and I wouldn’t turn down a nutty morsel when offered, but they’re never my go-to treat. I don’t crave them like I do a proper fudgy brownie, or chewy caramel candies. When offered the choice between peanut butter cookies and just about any other comparable confection, be it gingerbread, biscotti, thumbprints and beyond, it’s almost always going to fall to last place.
Perhaps this isn’t such a scandalous admission, especially compared to the controversy that merely including raisins in cookies can cause, but somehow it feels like a personal shortcoming. There must be something inherently wrong with me that I can’t appreciate the subtle art of classic peanut butter cookies more thoroughly.
Ultimately, it comes down to texture. I’m not talking about creamy versus crunchy spreads; the very foundation of the treat fails to meet my expectations for an ideal cookie. Coarsely textured, a bit crumbly and sometimes sandy, yet it doesn’t have the same buttery richness of shortbread. Plagued by dryness if over-baked for a single second, they’re easy to throw together, but shockingly unforgiving once they hit the oven. Making peanut butter cookies is a snap; making great peanut butter cookies is no small task.
The solution is surprisingly simple: add more peanut butter.
Peanut butter powder stands in for plain flour, adding an extra punch of rich, nutty flavor along with a more flexible foundation. Working in concert with cornstarch for a gluten-free base, the results are exceedingly tender, soft, and chewy. Better yet, there’s no eggs or butter anywhere to be found in such a spare list of ingredients. In fact, no extra oil is needed at all when you can harness the natural oil of the peanuts themselves.
Complete with classic crosshatching, they may look like the traditional sort of peanut butter cookies that deserve only a passing glance, but I’d implore you to look closer. These treats could upset the conventional cookie hierarchy as we know it.
Vegan Avenue – Hearts of Palm Ceviche
Sunny’s Backyard – Crispy Chickpeas
Sassy’s Vegetarian Soul Food – Fried Cabbage
Prim & Proper – Vegan Cheese Board
Maha Market – Potato Samosa
Chilaquiles Factory – Elote
Bento Picnic – Kabocha Potato Salad and Cucumber Sunomono
In a world dominated by quick-fix meals, instant entrees, and fast food, it can be hard to deliberately slow down. If there’s a way to cook faster to eat sooner, why deny yourself that immediate gratification? Patience is truly a virtue, yielding even greater rewards to those who can wait. This is true of life in general, and shiitake mushrooms in particular.
Yes, dried shiitake mushrooms need time to fully rehydrate, reviving to their original brilliance with even greater savory depth than before. Most recipes haphazardly plunge them into boiling water for 15 – 20 minutes, rushing through the process just to get them to a generally edible state. Sure, they’ll be soft enough to slice, but so much of their rich, distinctive aroma will be lost that you might as well be using a bland button mushroom instead. These hot shiitakes will be a far cry from the flavorful powerhouses they could have been.
Sugimoto shiitake are dried using a far-infrared drying approach, which minimizes moisture to less than 9% (whereas others are 12% or more) to preserve the highest quality possible. This process breaks the Shiitake’s cell membrane, allowing it to release a greater amount of Guanylate when rehydrated. Soaking for at least 12 hours and ideally 24 hours in cold water slowly, gently coaxes out the full range of savory flavors locked inside. The texture is remarkably better, too, producing plump caps with a juicy yet tender bite.
If you must take a shortcut, there is one way to speed things up; remove the stems first, and you can reduce the overall time to about 8 hours. You do still need to plan ahead of course, but if you start thinking about dinner at breakfast time like me, this trick is an invaluable ace to have up your sleeve. That said, patience is definitely not my strong suit, so I’ve learned to keep soaked shiitake in the fridge at all times, ready whenever cravings might strike.
One of my favorite pasta dishes is mushroom stroganoff, which has evolved considerably through equal parts education and experimentation. It can be thrown together in minutes or raised to new culinary heights given greater advanced planning. Any sort of pasta will do in a pinch, but homemade pasta infused with the deep savory flavor of Sugimoto dried shiitake powder puts it in a whole new category of everyday indulgence.
Garlicky cream sauce bathes the cascading noodles in a tidal wave of luscious mushroom goodness, infusing every element of the dish with incredible amounts of umami and tanmi. Though the original version utilizes rough cuts of beef, thickly sliced shiitake are meaty enough to satisfy without any sacrifice.
It really does pay to slow down, take the long route, and savor every moment. This mushroom stroganoff may take a while from start to finish, but it disappears quickly.
Potato salad is like the little black dress of dishes; it’s suitable for all gatherings and occasions, never going out of style. Potato salad is better than a little black dress, however, because it’s infinitely adaptable, rather than being restricted to the same basic routine for years on end. Not to mention, potato salad always fits.
Riffing off the classic creamy chilled spuds, this tropical twist makes a colorful splash with vibrant Okinawan sweet potatoes. More than a bland starchy base, these tender cubes are naturally sweet, like orange yams. As the name might suggest, they’re originally from the southernmost island of Japan, but were also cultivated by Polynesians in Hawaii, where it thrived in the rich volcanic soil. That’s what inspired the tropical flair for the rest of the chilled salad.
Crisp, buttery macadamia nuts are a key ingredient to making this simple recipe shine. That crunchy contrast against the tender flesh of the potatoes, paired with the creamy twang of tart coconut yogurt, sets it apart from average humble spuds.
Next time you need a quick dish for a gathering, no matter the season, think of potato salad and more specifically, purple potato salad, if you really want to wow your friends and family. Everyone will remember this dish long after memories of fashion trends are forgotten.