over & over
assorted sandwiches, plus comforting soup and chili
Greetings, fellow travellers. Sorry for the unannounced break last week— I was putting my creative juices to work outside of the kitchen, so we mostly ate sandwiches and cobbled-together forms of leftovers, which left me with little of interest to share with you, and little desire to write about it. I’ve still been a little busy so this might be shorter than usual.
Does spring feel like it’s on the horizon for you? It seems impossible that, after fairly heavy snow only… what, a week ago? there are buds starting to appear on the trees, and that we’ll set the clocks ahead this weekend. But the sun we’ve had the past few days has given me back a bit of motivation. Maybe you’re finding the same. Or maybe not. But it’s nice that for once my laundry’s getting folded before sitting on the drying rack for four days, and that I’m getting a little more satisfaction from my routines instead of feeling like everything is a tedious, unwanted chore. We’ll see if it sticks after we spring forward (and it starts raining again).
My sourdough loaves have turned out really nice lately, I think because I’ve started keeping the lid on the dutch oven for the first half of the baking time, which gives them a softer interior texture and a slightly higher rise due to less moisture being lost during baking. I keep trying new patterns of scoring the top, and they never seem to turn out like I intend, but they always look pretty good anyway. Anyway, I suppose it makes sense we’ve gravitated towards sandwiches: it’s not just laziness, it’s also a desire to use the bread while it’s fresh.
One of these was the red-hot tempeh BLT I make often, and it’s really more like a vegan buffalo wing than it is like bacon, but it’s a very good sandwich, one of my favourite things to make with tempeh. It also wasn’t really a BLT because this time of year lettuce is both a luxury in terms of price and garbage in terms of quality. Instead I make alfalfa sprouts in a screen-lidded jar on the counter when I remember to do so. It only takes a few days for them to mature, and they last a lot longer in the fridge than the store-bought ones, presumably because they’re totally fresh when they go in there.
Another really nice sandwich was a gruyère and cheddar grilled cheese with roasted fennel. I’ve come around on fennel: I used to find its licorice-y taste too intense, but now I find it’s nice when it’s balanced by the caramelization of roasting, and/or in pairing it with something sweet or creamy (it’s nice when it’s sliced super thin on a mandoline for salads or pizza). We ate this with a kale and roasted beet salad in tarragon-dijon vinaigrette. Tarragon has a similar flavour profile to fennel, so it was a nice unifying feature, and the sweetness and acidity of the salad was good as a contrast to the sandwich. Normally I am all in on grilled cheese with soup, but every once in awhile, a salad is a nice match, too.
However, I did also have a classic soup and grilled cheese moment with this week’s loaf of bread, making a lentil-vegetable soup with thyme and tarragon. The soup is a staple from the Veganomicon, something I’ve been making fairly regularly for probably ten years or more. It’s one that might sound unexciting from reading the small list of ingredients, but it holds so much flavour and is really just a joy to eat if you’ve got fresh bread around. The recipe uses French (also known as puy) lentils, which are a little smaller and give it a nice texture, but I used brown lentils this time since I was hungry and they cook a bit faster, and it was still super satisfying and delicious. I usually use Hungarian paprika in it since that’s what the recipe calls for, but now I’m wondering what it’d be like to try with smoked paprika instead. Maybe next time.
I also made one of my most beloved chili recipes this week, because I remembered I can simply crumble up a couple of Beyond patties and use them as ground meat (the recipe also has a mushroom option if you aren’t into meat or fake meat). I love the depth the molasses adds to this, and the pop of colour and texture from the corn. I wasn’t looking at the recipe so I accidentally went a little lighter than usual on the tomatoes— I love to use fire-roasted here— but I didn’t mind it a bit more bean-heavy. We also didn’t have any fresh hot peppers, so I threw in a dried one while frying the onions, and added a few dashes of Pain is Good garlic hot sauce at the end, and it was perfect. Because I made this before I’d made the bread, my side was some kind of tropical corn chip, which was actually pretty great, because who doesn’t like an excuse to dip chips into stuff?
I might have mentioned that Jeff’s gotten into the habit of making pizza dough on the weekend and letting it ferment for a couple of days so we can make it easily during the week, so now Tuesday is almost always pizza day. Heating up the pizza stone at 500° and then using the broiler to cook the pizza from the top while the stone heats the bottom has given us great results so far. This week, I blended up the remainder of the fire-roasted tomatoes from the can I’d opened for the chili into a sauce for the base, which is excellent flavour-wise.
Last week we’d been too lazy to blend up tomatoes for sauce, so we got a bit more creative. One was a mix of two pestos, basil and arugula, with our usual capocollo and pineapple on top; and for the other, we used some leftover pizza bowl sauce (something between a romesco sauce and a cashew cream) and tempeh bacon with olives and mushrooms. It felt kind of meta to use the sauce inspired by the flavours of pizza on an actual pizza (usually it’s a topping for a rice bowl), but it worked pretty well, and saved us having to wash the food processor, so everybody wins.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. And finally, we all know this is true (feel free to tell me about yours in the comments).