The Smiling Onion

Vegetarian and Gluten-free Cooking

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Irish Flag Skillet

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Happy St. Paddy’s Day, everyone! I hope you are all gearing up for some Jameson and Guinness (well, skip the Guinness if you’re gluten-free like me!) It’s a beautiful day in New York City, so I, for one, am planning to do my celebrating outdoors.

If I decide to celebrate, that is. In all honesty – while I am partial to Irish whiskey (who isn’t?) –  St. Paddy’s Day is not my favorite holiday. This probably started about six years ago, when I had the extreme misfortune of working in Times Square during the St. Paddy’s Day madness. If you’re a native New Yorker (or someone who has lived here for a while), you probably agree with me that Times Square is almost never a pleasant place to be. But while most of us can stomach walking through it on the way to something better (which is really anywhere but Times Square)  – on St. Paddy’s Day, it’s really best to avoid it at all costs. At least that was the case six years ago, when I was working in the Paramount Building, right smack dab in the center of it all.

Venturing out on my lunch break at 1 PM – mind you, this wouldn’t have been quite as upsetting if it had happened later in the day – I was met with a mob of green-clad, drunken, obnoxious frat boys. This frat must have swallowed a pinch of magic leprechaun dust or something, because it was expanding exponentially as I attempted to make my way to the deli a block away. Now I have nothing against frat boys; I mean, I went to Oberlin, so … (For those of you who aren’t picking up on my sarcasm, Oberlin is a hippy dippy liberal arts college where you’d be hard pressed to find a frat boy even if he held the key to unlocking the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You can find plenty of hipsters, though!) But…I do have something against exponentially expanding swarms of frat boys who are already drunk at 1 PM and have completely taken over Times Square. Suffice it to say it was NOT a pleasant journey to the deli and back. And it definitely took me out of the St. Paddy’s Day spirit for quite a while.

I have, however, held on to some St. Paddy’s day traditions. I’m currently wearing green (I will never say no to some good luck!) and I enjoyed a delicious skillet for breakfast this morning inspired by the colors of the Irish flag. It’s got caramelized onions, fingerling potatoes, and swiss cheese for the white component; some tender red kale for the green component (red kale for the green component? In case you’re confused, red kale has purple stems and greenish/purplish leaves but it’s basically a dark green once it’s cooked); and for the orange component, some cute carrot chunks that pop out at you every once in a while with a nice bite of sweetness. And yes, I know Irish cheddar would have been more St. Paddy’s Day appropriate, but the swiss is REALLY, REALLY good here. Trust me.

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Mini Portobello Pizzas (Grain-Free!)

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About a week ago, I was in the middle of some mundane task that I’m failing to remember at the moment, when I suddenly had a vision: portobello pizza. I don’t mean pizza topped with portobellos; that, while very tasty, is hardly worthy of being called a stroke of inspiration. No, I mean pizzas made out of portobellos. “Think about it,” I told Bobby (my fiancé.) “They’re round, would hold toppings well, go with pizza-like flavors, and are way more flavorful than most pizza crusts, both gluten-free and gluten-laden.” Bobby was skeptical. “Would it really feel like pizza if there was no bread component?” I was adamant that it would.

A week later, I tested my theory. And I’m happy to say I was absolutely right. (As I am about most things we disagree on — just kidding, just kidding.) In any case, when I presented him with the finished product, Bobby was  sold. “This should be a thing,” he said. “They should do this in restaurants.”

Indeed, they should. And possibly it’s already a thing – I haven’t Googled it yet. But I’m pretty sure someone must have come up with the same idea at some point because it’s such a perfect pizza option: it’s grain-free, super easy, doesn’t require you to make any type of crust, and also happens to hit that comfort-food note that you expect from a good pizza. And — for my dairy-free people — portobellos are insanely juicy and flavorful, so even if you make your pizzas without cheese, you’ll still get the satisfaction of that gooey, drippy, messy pizza heaven that everyone deserves to experience once in a while.

On that note, authenticity was definitely not my goal when I created these, but they are authentic in one major way: it’s easiest to eat these with a knife and fork. And that’s how they eat their pizza in Italy, baby! If you are lucky enough to have leftovers and they cool down to room temperature, then you can pick ’em up. It may be a tad messy, but in the gooey, drippy, pizza-heaven way I mentioned earlier.

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Wine-Braised Carrots with Butter and Chives

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This dish may look and sound simple – and as far as preparation goes, it is. But in terms of flavor, it’s anything but.

The first time I made this, I was in a food rut. I wanted to eat – badly – but nothing sounded remotely appealing. Finally, I realized I was craving one specific ingredient, and nothing else was going to cut it. That ingredient? Butter. I wanted that rich, soft, comforting, fatty, full-bodiedness that comes from butter and butter alone. (Red palm oil does come close, but it’s not quite the same.) In any case, once I figured out that my body wanted butter, I was home free (in terms of getting out of my food rut, that is.)

It’s a little-known fact that my favorite vegetable is the carrot – I absolutely love its versatility, sweetness, color, texture – everything. Plus it’s good for your vision and super easy to digest! So of course I found myself with a pound of carrots on my cutting board and a vegetable peeler in my right hand. I was originally planning to just sauté some carrots in butter and call it a day (in which case there would be no blog post for me to write today), but I happened to walk away from my pan shortly after plopping those carrots in, and I didn’t return until several minutes later when I found them a lovely shade of gold and also realized I’d better deglaze the pan before I had a clean-up nightmare on my hands. So I reached for the red wine.

And the rest is history. For when I popped one in my mouth, I realized these were the caviar of carrots – the quotidian transformed into the extravagant. These sumptuous golden nuggets had the complexity of flavor of a slow-braised pheasant stuffed with white truffles foraged from a secret mountainside somewhere in France (if I told you where, I’d have to kill you); drizzled with a sauce made from the roots of a thousand-year-old redwood and herbs from the aforementioned secret mountainside — simmered together by pure sunlight over a period of many months; and finished with a black sea salt only obtained by scraping a deep-sea creature’s tongue. (Okay, maybe not, but they were pretty damn delicious. And probably more delicious than the salt scraped from a deep-sea creature’s tongue, because that actually sounds fairly revolting.)

When I come out of a food rut, I come back hard. I suddenly wanted to eat everything! Well, everything containing these carrots, at least. I’d serve them with herbed quinoa and balsamic lentils, or white-bean croquettes, or…the possibilities were endless.

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Ginger-Turmeric Tonic

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The weather these past few days has been so lovely that it was particularly difficult to wake up this morning and realize February is back. Yup, it is cold, grey, and wet. I also woke up with a sore throat, which added insult to injury.

On days like this, I’m really glad I keep fresh ginger and turmeric in the house at all times – a bit of fiery, warming tonic was just what I needed to overcome the gloom, nip the sore throat in the bud, and look ahead to sunny skies and carefree days.

Whether you’ve been overdoing it on sugar and sweets as much as I have lately, or you just need a bit of extra immune support, or you are super duper healthy and feel amazing, I recommend this tonic to you. Ginger and turmeric are both extremely medicinal and can do wonders for your body! Both are anti-inflammatory (turmeric, especially, has an often-cited compound called curcumin that does everything from inhibiting cancer cell growth to relieving pain in people with joint issues), amazing for maintaining overall well-being and health, and great for your digestive system. If you are interested in learning more about the health benefits of turmeric and ginger, I definitely encourage you to do your own research – there are way too many different health benefits to do them all justice in this short post!

Besides doing wonders for your health, I also find this tonic to be incredibly delicious. It’s wonderfully warming and intensely spicy – if you’re the type who always asks for extra ginger in your chai or juice, this drink is for you. You will feel the Bern! (Er…burn. I meant burn. I am not in any way affiliated with Bernie Sanders’ campaign. I will be voting for him, though :p)

I should mention that if you aren’t a fan of ginger or spice, this drink is probably not for you. You may want to return to some green tea, despite its far inferior light green color. (This tonic has the most beautiful dark reddish tint to it!)

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Superfood Bowl for the Super Bowl

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Unbeknownst to me (until this morning), Super Bowl Sunday is in just two days. As a 100 percent non-sports person,  I always feel a tiny bit of dread when this particular event rolls around. Try as I might, I cannot get excited about football, even when the rules are explained to me for the 20th time. (I have severe short-term memory issues with regards to the rules of any sport.)  But, since I appreciate any and all holidays…er…excuses to eat and drink, I still like to acknowledge it in some way: usually a food-related one. (By the way, can you even call the Super Bowl a holiday?? This is how little I know about sports.)

Super Bowl recipes are all over social media right now, but pretzels and wings aren’t really my thing. Instead, I decided to create a Super Bowl of my own…or rather a Superfood Bowl, since it’s packed with delicious and nutritious ingredients like beets, millet, and garbanzo beans. It’s also topped with an amazing Creamy Basil-Hemp Sauce  that you can use on just about anything — including those more traditional Super Bowl standards like pretzels and potato chips.  (By the way, hemp seeds are utterly ridiculous — in a good way —when it comes to nutrient-packed foods. Can you say perfect balance of Omega 3s and 6s? 10 grams of protein in 3 tablespoons? I’m telling you…they are LOADED with good stuff!)

The bowl is super easy and can be customized to your liking: just choose the ingredients you feel like eating! Not a fan of millet? Use rice or quinoa. Beets aren’t your thing? Try purple cabbage. As long as you have a nice variety of colors and textures, your bowl is sure to be SUPER! (Provided you top it with my basil-hemp sauce, of course :p)

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Baked Tempeh Strips

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Let me start off by saying that I have never been a tempeh lover. In fact, I’ve pretty much always been a tempeh hater. Give me tofu any day, but tempeh…yuck! No matter how many different ways it was served to me, I  always found it to have a  very strong, pungent (and sometimes bitter) flavor which was offputting, to say the least.

That is, until I discovered the secret to great tempeh: cut it THINLY, cover it with a really flavorful marinade, and roast the hell out of it! It’s simple, easy, and very quick to prepare. You don’t need to let it sit in the marinade, because the flavor bakes into it during the roasting process. You don’t need to simmer it first (a technique we were taught in cooking school that was supposed to get rid of the bitterness – it didn’t). And you don’t need to bread it, or deep fry it, or sing to it, or curse it, or bless it – you just need to cut it thinly, people! There is nothing more revolting (in my humble opinion) than big, thick, scalloped chunks of tempeh. So why is it so often served that way?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do encourage any tempeh skeptics out there to try this method of preparation, if you haven’t yet. These strips are savory, salty, and satisfying. They are great on their own as a high-protein snack, or fantastic on a salad, sandwich, or lettuce wrap. I like to keep them in a ziplock bag in the fridge and munch on them whenever I feel the need for something protein-packed and delicious.

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Blueberry-Blue Corn Pancakes

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Waking up Saturday to the insane blizzard outside, I had one thing on my mind: pancakes. Snow days just scream for them! Unfortunately, my trusty cast iron pan (the absolute BEST type of pan to make pancakes in, IMO) had been out of commission for quite some time. It had started to flake, and was in desperate need of reseasoning, a task I of course put on the “To Do This Weekend” list almost every single weekend for a good year but never actually did.

The howling wind and relentless snow outside, however, gave me a new sense of purpose – THIS was the day. After all, pancakes awaited!  I am always a bit obsessive about any task I don’t yet have down to a science (reseasoning cast iron included) so after an hour of internet research that yielded a LOT of contradictory information about oven temp, oil type, face up or face down in the oven, time, etc., I finally just decided – for my own sanity – to follow The Kitchn’s instructions. Unfortunately, I ended up with a sticky cast iron pan – there were tar-like patches (probably from oil drippings) all over its surface! Luckily, after another 30 minutes of research, I found this extremely entertaining (and highly effective) Youtube video, which I more or less followed – minus the beer and cigarettes portion (you’ll understand if you ever happen to have a sticky cast iron issue and decide to watch the video).

Anyway, I hope that was helpful for anyone “in a similar situation,” as Arlo Guthrie would say. The long and short of it is … I finally ended up with a beautiful, non-flaky, non-sticky cast iron pan and a wonderful batch of blueberry-blue corn pancakes! They were perfect for a snowy morning (well…early afternoon at that point) and a lovely way to celebrate the resurgence of my cast iron pan.

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Warming Spiced Lentil Soup

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There is something so incredibly nourishing about a nice, warm, hearty bowl of soup. And the aroma that fills the kitchen while it’s gently simmering on the stove is second to none. In fact, this particular soup smelled so good that I was reminded of the children’s story The Tale of Despereaux, which is set in a kingdom that holds soup in such high esteem that they have a holiday devoted to it every year! (That is, until a visiting rat is so entranced by the aroma of the Queen’s soup that he accidentally falls into her bowl, causing her to die of shock, which in turn causes soup to be outlawed in the kingdom!) Horrible, right? And what’s with rats being foodies in children’s stories, btw? (I recently rewatched Ratatouille.)

Anyway, I’m not going to ruin the book for you, but suffice it to say that the kingdom had it right: soup is so good that we really should have a holiday devoted to it. And if it were ever outlawed, I would totally join in on the illegal soup making that happens in The Tale of Despereaux. (Yes, there is illegal soup making … because soup is just that good!)

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Vegan Caesar Salad Dressing (Soy-Free and Nut-Free!)

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I’ve always been a caesar salad coveter. At restaurants, potlucks, cafeterias … I’ve often caught myself ogling that pile of romaine with the luscious, creamy dressing and fantasizing about bite after bite of delicious, crispy, creamy, sinful goodness.  I was devastated the first time I learned that, while there was no visible meat to speak of, the dressing harbored what I considered to be a dark secret: anchovies.

Mind you, I was well aware of most foods that had hidden meat – beef stock in French onion soup, chicken stock in so many classic veggie soups, lard in Mexican beans – and I was never that enraged by any of it. The hidden meat was enough to keep me far away, but that was fine with me; there was no coveting – no looking longingly at a neighboring table’s order and imagining what it would be like to eat it.

With caesar salad, however, I’ve embarrassed myself more than once. There is something about it that is just so tantalizing. So when vegan caesar dressings started popping up in some vegetarian restaurants, I was super excited. Until I went rice-free, that is. Because guess what all vegan caesar salad dressings (that I’ve ever seen) have in common? Miso! And guess what miso is made from? Soy and rice.

So I decided to create a vegan caesar-style dressing that is soy-free, nut-free, and grain-free. It uses sunflower seeds as a base, and is caesared-up with roasted seaweed sheets (the ones that come in the little seaweed snack packages) and umeboshi vinegar. It is very easy to make, requires zero planning (you don’t have to soak the seeds or anything), and has a creamy, salty, savory, tangy flavor that should work for all your caesar salad needs. I’ve tried it massaged into kale, on romaine, and as a dip for carrot sticks. While you won’t taste anchovies, you will get that creamy texture and savory flavor that (in my opinion) is the defining feature of a caesar dressing.

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Coffee-Scented Gingerbread with Amaretto Cream

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Holiday greetings from San Antonio! I’m here with Bobby (my fiancé) and his family, enjoying the 70 degree weather and filling up on Indian food – one of your best options if you happen to be vegetarian in Texas. (For a complete list of the best San Antonio vegetarian spots, email me – I’ve had a couple years to figure it out :p)

Despite the warm weather, we are gearing up for Christmas, which is quite an affair down here. Bobby’s family is insanely large, and in just two days, we all get to be crammed in one home (luckily the homes are much bigger here than in New York) and fight for survival – er – celebrate. And this year my family of Yankee Jews are going to join in on the festivities for the first time! It should be a Christmas to remember.

I’m getting in the holiday spirit by baking, of course. And there is nothing that screams “holiday” quite like the smell of freshly baked gingerbread.

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