earth, wind, and fire
the beginning of the end of harvest time
Fire season is late this year. The scenes from California and Oregon are apocalyptic, and northbound winds have even brought the smoke here to the south coast (blessedly, it’s been a comparatively quiet year for fires in BC). For the most part the fires themselves have not been a huge threat to people, but the level of smoke and haze over cities like Salem and San Francisco is deeply unsettling, to say the least. And it feels bizarre to be talking to you about food when a significant portion of the west coast is aflame during a pandemic, but as this tweet neatly puts it, what can we do but attempt to go about our lives amid the ever-present background noise of worry?
It’s been Summer: The Empire Strikes Back this week in the lower mainland, putting my soup-making dreams on hold, but meaning I got to appreciate a long bike ride and some very good sorbetto (strawberry-rhubarb and piña colada) at the park. Aside from weirdness of seeing thousands of moths all over the city and hazy skies from wildfire smoke, we’ve also had a few days of above 90% humidity, even on days when it wasn’t very hot— I was outside picking tomatoes at 6pm on the weekend, wondering why I was sweating through my shirt when it was only 20°C.
However, the need for a baked good strikes without warning and with great power, so I bravely heated up my house to make vegan peanut butter brownies. They were supposed to be the nice-looking swirl kind, but the peanut butter part turned out too stiff to do anything with other than blob on top of the chocolate part (I suspect my bottom-of-the-tub natural peanut butter is to blame). It turned out like a brownie with soft peanut butter sugar cookie bits, which was honestly pretty good. If you want the proper swirled version though, I definitely recommend using an emulsified peanut butter.
At the start of the pandemic I gave myself the gift of a NYT Cooking subscription, and whatever your feelings on anything else the New York Times does, the recipes are generally high quality and range from so easy your kid could make it, to fiddly or time-consuming but worth it. A few recipes I found early in lockdown have since become favourites in my house, and I’ve tried some more complex stuff that I might not have trusted to be good had I found the recipe elsewhere, so I’d say it’s worth the price if you’ve been considering it. And a quick FYI for my Toronto pals, in case you don’t already know: if you have a library card, you can log into the site for free!
Anyway, every day I seemed to have more tomatoes, so I made this excellent pasta again: cappelletti with spicy cherry tomato sauce and crispy capers. For a long time my ‘fried capers’ tasted good but were never very crispy, due to my previously mentioned lack of confidence using very hot oil. But the combination of patting them dry thoroughly before cooking and actually daring to use a heat above medium got them to a beautifully crisp texture just short of deep-fried in about 4 minutes. I recommend making way more than you need for your meal, because you’ll keep snacking on them while you cook! The sauce for this is simple— just chili flakes, garlic, tomato paste, the tomatoes, and some of your pasta water— but spicy and delicious. I like to add a pinch or two of smoked paprika for even more depth of flavour.
Our zucchini plant is still producing, so I made this recipe by Sohla El-Waylly for red lentil zucchini fritters. It involves a couple of steps you have to remember to do early (soaking the lentils, salting and draining the zucchini & onion) but it’s otherwise very straightforward and doesn’t involve a lot of ingredients. If you make this, soak the lentils as long as you can— I did about 6 hours and they puréed nicely, but I tested one after the first hour and it was still pretty crunchy. I also didn’t mess around with cutting the zucchini into matchsticks like in the recipe; I just used the shredder attachment for the food processor and got slightly smaller pieces, which may have helped the fritters hold together a bit easier, too. Frying them in peanut oil in my largest cast iron took 2 batches and they were perfectly crispy on the outside— eating them felt somewhere in between falafel and pakora. To go alongside, I roasted some rainbow carrots from the garden with cumin seeds and a bit of honey & lemon, and added za’atar to the lemon yogurt from the recipe.
As our larger heirloom tomato plants start to give up the ghost, I decided to cut the spots off some of the more questionable ones and try smoking them on the barbecue. We have a gas grill and I found conflicting opinions on how to do it, and in trying not to burn the tomatoes I think I ended up with too low a temperature to get the chips to smoke very much, because the tomatoes were perfectly roasted but didn’t have much smoke flavour. When I opened up the smoker box later only a handful of the chips were even singed, so it seems like they dried back out before they had a chance to create much smoke. I’m willing to give it another shot, maybe letting them heat up at a higher temperature before putting the tomatoes on the grill.
With my fire-roasted-but-not-really-smoked tomatoes, I made risotto, something I am a fan of cooking (and eating). Once you have a good base method for making risotto you can really take it anywhere and feature any sort of flavours you want, so it’s a nice way to showcase whatever seasonal vegetables you have on hand. Because I was still interested in a smoky flavour, towards the end I added a couple ounces of smoked vegan cheeze, which created the smoke level I had hoped for and a little extra creaminess. I stirred in some fresh thyme and basil and topped with pecorino and a cherry tomato— it was a wonderfully satisfying and balanced dish that I hope to make again before all our garden tomatoes rot.
Media:
Many of you may know that while I have never been vegan and am no longer vegetarian, I tend to cook and eat in a way I like to think of as “plant-focused”: mostly vegetarian and vegan food with meat in the “sometimes” category. I wanted to share this piece from Eater (from a larger collection about the future of restaurants in the wake of COVID-19), about how fake meat, while itself can be sustainable, is an incomplete solution to a sustainability and ethical problem that will continue to exist: the demands of capitalism on the supply chain. The piece discusses how no matter the level of progress we make in the world of plant-based meat alternatives, many people will still choose to eat meat instead, maintaining the demand for mass-produced animal products.
The idea that veganism, or even just eating less meat— which many studies have touted as a significant force for change— is the way to a better future is inherently flawed: it leaves the responsibility of creating that future up to the individual, when it is not individuals who are largely responsible for the damage. We cannot leave the matter of creating safer and more sustainable agriculture in the hands of people who are just trying to eat. This quote resonated:
It is not so much about vegan eating as it is about creating systems that enable farming that is humane for the environment, people, and animals.
What this acknowledges is that under capitalism’s demands for more and cheaper products, even a fully vegan diet cannot be exempt from questions of ethics and sustainability within farming. To be clear, there are plenty of reasons to eat vegan or to try to make thoughtful choices about our food and I’m not saying those choices are pointless. I’m merely agreeing that in order to truly create a better world for workers, animals, the climate, and consumers, we need the system to drastically change from the top down, not the bottom up.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with a friend! I leave you with this instagram, which provides a weekly table still life photo for artists to recreate in any medium, with varied and lovely results.