RUDY!

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Vegan Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies from the Post Punk Kitchen. Believe it or not, they have tofu in them. What?

A Worthy Sunday Brunch

Scrambled eggs with chopped onions, sautéed rappi, and smothered with melted shredded asiago cheese.

An Unworthy Outing

The restaurant: Alexandria's Mediterranean Cuisine

The ambience: Nice, but leaning too much towards the upscale cafeteria vibe.

The starter: A tasty, fresh salad, with bits of feta cheese, kalamata olives, and light dressing.

The meal: Feta and spinach stuffed ravioli, in a yucky Ragu-like tomato sauce.

The verdict: Ugh! Too salty, the flavor jumped all over the place. Pick a side and stick with it.

Three Things I Can Do with Three Baked Sweet Potatoes

1. Add butter, marjoram, and eat whole.


2. Slice and sandwich between sharp cheddar, baby spinach, and toasted whole wheat bread.


3. Mash with soy milk, freshly ground dried chipotle peppers, and a little Braggs amino acids.

A Sauce Unlike Any Other Sauce

• one bunch of garlic, roasted at 450 for a good 20-25 minutes


• chopped mayan sweet onion


• seeded (save the seeds--vary heat by amount of seeds used) and chopped up red jalapeno pepper


• 28 oz of crushed tomato sauce
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• lots of marjoram, some oil, and a little sauce

Guess The Flavor of Potato Chips

Food From Home

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1. Homemade plum bbq sauce on tofu served with wild greens and super potent provolone.


2. Tandoor lentil burgers with cucumber-yogurt sauce coupled with E's freshly bake rolls.


3. French brie, baguette, and my mom's homemade fig jam (she has a large fig tree in her backyard in Texas, it is simply amazing!).


4. Taco salad with my mexican mush, brown rice, and greens.


5. Heirloom tomato omelette with sharp cheddar. Heirloom tomato from my landlady's garden.


6. As seen in Eat me, Delicious, Mexican wedding cookies. For a twist, these were made with whole wheat flour and lemon zest.

Some Reviews

• Sticky Lips (625 Culver Road, Rochester NY)

  I went here with my sister and her boyfriend on Sept 12th. They are avid carnivores and I did not want to subject them to my vegetarian diet so we settled on this place because they have a couple of vegetarian items on the menu. I've been here before and back then my neighbor was working here as a cook. He came out of the kitchen, greeted us, and asked me if he could make me anything special. I told him I wanted a tofu bbq sandwich, which wasn't on the menu. It was tasty and dripping with bbq sauce goodness.

  I did not have this luxury now. I ordered a tofu plate with a spicy bbq sauce, a side of mac and cheese, a side of sweet potato fries, and a piece of sweet cornbread. The best part was the side of sweet potato fries, the rest was short of disgusting, but hardly worth a damn. Ouch.



• Moosewood Cafe (Dewitt Mall, Ithaca, NY)
  

  

  

  Moosewood's daily menu changes can be a gift and a curse. On one hand, you can always try something new, on the other hand, you always have to try something new. Maybe this doesn't ring true when you live nearby and see repeated dishes more frequently. I long for some of the dishes I've had here, but I seldom come across the same dish twice.

  Today, Sept 21st, I started with the ginger-lemon-honey tea, warm and frothy. Then I had the summer vegetable lasagna: roasted summer squash, fresh spinach, crumbled tofu in a tomato-wine sauce and topped with parmesan and ricotta cheeses. I would have preferred a bit more earthy-savory flavor to balance the bright-zesty flavor of the sauce and squash, perhaps some mushrooms could achieve this end. Still, a delight.

  For dessert, I had a slice of the Peach 'n' Cake, a rich and moist torte that was more cake-like than other tortes I've had - is that the proper way to pluralize torte? The peaches were glazed and permeated throughout the cake, leading to a peachy-keen bite down to the last sliver. Mmm.

• At the OpenFace Sandwich Eatery - a delightful concoction of celery and bartlett pears to form a bold, amorous (yes, it was sexual), savory soup. I mentioned it in my random comic, which was then featured at Cruelest Month, wherein the celery pear soup peaked the interest of the author, and eventually led to the award of free books, including the delicious poems of Zbigniew Herbert. The soup is like having a good conversation with an old friend while out on a brisk night-time walk under a full moon with a cool breeze blowing.


• New Health Cafe - a new vegetarian restaurant in the Rochester area. (For those keeping track, in my Rochester-lifetime, which is about 3-4 years, this is the sixth vegetarian restaurant--unfortunately, it doesn't look like this one is going to stick around long.) I went there with a group of eight people. We had a variety of dishes, I think we all felt the food was generally bland. However, the tofu in my BBQ tofu plate was very good. I could tell it was fresh and homemade, hence the scrumptious, spongy resilience that is a pleasure to bite into and a feature lacking in most commercially available tofu. The cooked vegetables were bland, which I would not mind if they were in the peak of the season, when the flavor holds its own, but this time, they could not. A little Braggs can go a long way while retaining the health.


• At the Rochester Public Market, from one of the bakeries, not Richport, and not Di Paolo, the other one, anyway, they had a sweet potato cobbler, it was very good, even despite the burnt/crispy edges that must have oozed out during baking. (I cut them off.)


• I recently discovered Boylan's bottled drinks (vintage soda pop). The red birch beer, in particular. They use cane sugar, the only way I'll drink pop. Their prices are considerably less than my other favorites: Hank's and Virgils, but I haven't compared Boylan's root beer, yet.
  

• I just made some banana bread muffins with Jules as my audience. She was pestering me for the recipe for a while, but I told her I didn't really have a recipe. I do have a recipe, it just doesn't have all the annotations that are necessary to acheive the end product. So she watched as I made them and took notes as I detailed key points in the process. It is all needlessly complicated, but sometimes obfuscation can be fun.


• I made an egg-less quiche. I think that is pretty phenomenal. It was a steamed broccoli and sharp provolone quiche made with Ener-G Egg Replacer and a homemade crumbly pastry crust. I was very pleased with the outcome. It only lasted for about two days. I tried to invite others to have some, but by the time I got through to them, I had eaten it all!


• A kale-onion tofu stir-fry with rice wine and soy sauce. The kale was a little undercooked, it didn't wilt as I hoped it would. Maybe I need a wok for better results.


• During Jesse's visit, we bought fresh berries and mesclun to accompany our tortillas and cheese while walking about the Chimney Bluffs but forgot the berries and mesclun in the car, classic! Eating tortillas with cheese while perched on the edge of an unstable sheer cliff made it okay.

• Moosewood Restaurant (Ithaca, NY), wherein I had a delightful Moroccan soirée who's beguiling red sauce packed a potent punch of East African spices that were fried into an olfactive frenzy. 'Twas followed by vegan chocolate cake, who's richness I could hardly stand, but knew I couldn't live with myself had I left it behind. The baked pears were disappointing because I expected them to be piping hot, but they were room temperature if not chilled.


• Magnolia Cafe (Park Ave., Rochester, NY), where at I grabbed a late lunch of their Mac 'N Cheese with a house salad. The M'N'C was very uninspired. It lacked punch. Sure, it was creamy--something my own Mac 'N Cheese lacks since I do not cook with creams or milk--but the cheese flavor was subtle, subdued to silence and not worth the skrilla. The salad was good though, though the four cheese dressing was deceptive. I am reminded of why I do not frequent this establishment, even though they are the only place I know of that has the infamous Racko card game.


• Wegmans Green Bar (Pittsford, NY) is a relatively new establishment. They have a very limited menu but a surprising variety. I've had several items and the best would have to be the Thai Vegetables I had today. A bunch of vegetables (young sprouts, squashes, bell peppers, celery, fresh soy beans and mushrooms) simmered with a mild thai sauce and served on a bowl of brown rice. I like that the thai sauce was not overwhelming. It supplied a suggestion of thai while allowing the vegetables to show that they could hold their own.

1. Make my own soy milk (also need to get a double boiler)


2. Make my own tofu cakes (follows, naturally, from the first item)


3. Make my own tempeh (but I need some Rhizopus oligosporus so that one is last on the list)

• appetizer: baked macaroni and cheese with shaved black truffles and truffle oil - during which time, as I was served, the chef said to me, "you are starting an addiction." And I said, what do you mean, and he said, "its like crack". I reassured him that I make my own mac and cheese but I cannot afford the truffles, so I am sure I won't be so addicted. I'd say I was wrong, if it wasn't for one little thing. Wait, first let me say that the truffles were amazing, the aroma was so rich and smoky and isolated truffles were delicious on the palatte, the problem is that wegmans uses something, I don't quite know what it is, but it is something in their creamy cheesey sauces that leaves a bad after taste. I've experienced it before in an au gratin dish. It is probably something simple that is unneccesary, but I can not isolate it. Maybe a cheap american cheese? It could also be a heavy cream or milk, all things I do not use, and am, therefore, not used to the taste of.


• main course: cedar plank tofu with wilted aromatic greens, which were a mix of blue, red, and green greens, toasted garbonzo beans that were covered with this sweet crunchy crust (mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm(pop!)- that was my taste buds exploding), and served over steamed brown rice.


• All washed down with a bottle of mint tea from Honest Tea, served in a full bodied wine glass (classy - no doubt, I felt like a king.)

• Pesto - but not with parmesan cheese, that would be proper, I am talking about sharp cheddar cheese pesto with almonds in place of pine nuts, gasp!


• This one is really embarrassing, but that pesto was supposed to be served in pesto-pasta salad, but I didn't have pasta so I used rice noodles (humiliation ensues) - do you see the trend here, substitutes should be thoroughly researched.


• My tahini sauce served with rice noodles and fried tofu was not so good, but it wasn't horrible.

• My homemade peanut sauce with fried tofu and rice noodles was ab-fab and entirely improvised.


• My bbq tofu was a quick and inspiring victory, I pressed the tofu extra dry and froze it to make it even more firm than the "extra firm" on the label.


• The experimentation with sandwiches with unusual garnishes, i.e. sliced almonds, dried cranberries, and various cheeses, has produced many successful variations on a theme.


• Though I almost lost a finger, my meat cleaver shaved dark chocolate (hey what is a vegetarian to do with a meat cleaver?) and sliced almonds after dinner treat is wildly popular with all of my sweet teeth.


• My vegan apple/carrot scones were the best, the muffin form - not so good.
  

• My tried a true banana bread muffins


• Another "you can't possibly eff this up" recipe, homemade mac and cheese with three cheeses and real pasta, none of these substitutes.