The Battle of the Bulgur

A few weeks ago, I received a chain email. Now, there are only two types of chain email that even make it past my spam filter these days: “inspiring” poetry and/or quotations about being a strong woman, living each day like it’s my last, etc. that my mom sends me; and recipe exchanges. This chain email was the latter.

It stressed me out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it instructed me to come up with a recipe, send it to a person I didn’t know, and then forward the original email to my twenty closest friends. Twenty closest friends? If I had twenty close friends, I thought to myself, I wouldn’t drive them away by forwarding them chain email.

But I did just that. I forwarded the chain email to my seventeen closest friends (and three people whom I consider to be just so-so friends), and I sent a pretty tasty quinoa recipe to the random girl whose contact information was at the bottom of the chain email.

The second reason this recipe exchange stressed me out was that I had to indicate that I wanted only vegan recipes, of course. I put “vegan” in parentheses after my name and contact info, knowing that it would likely limit the amount of recipes I received in return.

And I was right. I received only three emails, one of which was an apology for not participating. (Um, I forgive you.) Fortunately, one of the emails was from my friend Kinley, and it contained a recipe for Bulgur with Spinach and Basil.

I didn’t know what bulgur was, so I went to my local hippie grocery store, Lazy Acres. Amazingly, nobody at Lazy Acres knew was bulgur was, either. But after spending about ten minutes hunting around the bulk section with the help of a dedicated sales associate, I found it.

Turns out, bulgur is just whole grain wheat. Here’s the recipe Kinley sent me:

Bulgur with Spinach and Basil

3 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups medium-grain bulgur
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon olive oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 bunch spinach (thick stems removed), coarsely chopped
1/2 cup fresh basil leaves, torn

First, I combined the vegetable broth, bulgur, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil in a skillet and brought it to a boil. Then I reduced the heat and let it simmer for about fifteen minutes, until the bulgur had absorbed all the broth. Meanwhile, I chopped up the spinach and basil. When the bulgur was ready, I just stirred in the greens until they were all wilted.

It tasted great; I always like the combination of spinach, basil, and garlic, and the bulgur was a nice change from boring old rice. I ate it as a main course and it was quite filling, but it would also work as a side dish.

As I nommed on my bulgur, I decided to send Kinley a text message to say thank you for the recipe. Unfortunately, Kinley had changed her number recently without telling me (and I am only a little suspicious that it’s because I send her annoying text messages). So I had the following text message conversation with someone who is now thoroughly confused:

Me: I made your bulgur recipe!
Not Kinley: Who’s this?
Me: How many people do you send bulgur recipes to?
Not Kinley: I don’t know what bulgur is
Me: With spinach and basil?
Not Kinley: No.

So, on the off chance that Not Kinley reads my blog: I hope this clears it up for you.

Ravioli Vegan(i): I'm a Bad Italian

You wouldn’t guess it from looking at me, but my mother is 100% Italian. Growing up, I spent many a summer on Cape Cod grumpily smearing 50 SPF sunscreen all over my body, including inside my ears, and then crowding under a beach umbrella with my white-as-rice Irish father to watch the rest of my family (whom genetics had blessed with olive-colored, sun-resistant skin) frolic in the waves. Venturing out from under the umbrella meant burning like the proverbial roof, which is, if you recall, on fire.

Nevertheless, I got to embrace my Italian roots by enjoying my Nonna’s cooking every time we went to visit my mom’s parents in Winthrop. My Nonna was the kindest woman in the world, about four and half feet tall and no more than 90 pounds, but that lady could wield a wooden spoon. She’d playfully threaten to spank us with it and tell us to go make trouble somewhere else whenever we got in the way in the kitchen. She never actually hit us with it - we were her "little dah-lins," after all, and besides, the spoon was usually covered in tomato sauce.

For anyone who has never experienced Italian cooking, don’t take my word for it: go out and find yourself a little Italian Nonna and convince her to serve you some homemade ravioli. It won’t be hard – just tell her you’ve lost a lot of weight recently and you can’t figure out why. You won't even get to finish your sentence before the Nonna will be forcibly stuffing ravioli in your mouth and mumbling in Italian about how you need to learn to eat.

Now, I’ve spent three summers living and performing in Italy, I’ve been blatantly hit on by a few dozen Italian men, and I even speak the language. Despite all this, I feel like the worst Italian ever. Because recently, I vegan-ized ravioli.

I purchased a box of frozen vegan ravioli from Rising Moon Organics at Lazy Acres a few weeks ago. I couldn't bring myself to commit the blasphemy of making vegan ravioli by hand - a process that would involve fake cheese - so I went for frozen ravioli with a butternut squash filling instead. The pasta was made without eggs (unbleached wheat flour, water, semolina flour, and tumeric) and the ravioli were stuffed with butternut squash, dried cane syrup, potato flakes, onion, garlic, black pepper, nutmeg (all organic) and sea salt.

It totally baffled me that on the side of the box of vegan ravioli there was a recipe for a non-vegan cream sauce. Did the people at Rising Moon Organics honestly think that if I ate cream, I'd be purchasing their product? Because I wouldn't. I would be too busy devouring real ravioli filled with real cheese to have time to betray my Italian heritage.

I decided to use the non-vegan recipe on the box as a guideline and invent my own sauce. Here's what I used:

2 tsp Earth Balance (fake butter)
1 cup almond milk
2 tsp agave syrup
pinch sea salt

I heated it up in a pot while I microwaved the frozen ravioli. The combination of almond milk, agave, and butternut squash was heavenly:

You can't really see the sauce, but trust me that it was there and it tasted good.

If my Nonna were alive, I'm sure she'd chase me down with her wooden spoon and spank me for being a bad Italian. But these ravioli actually tasted pretty good, and it's the first time I've invented a vegan pasta sauce. I call it Ravioli Vegan(i): senza uova e senza formaggio. 

Buon appetito!
(E a tutte le nonne italiane: mi dispiace per voi tradire.)

Lazy Thursday!

Ever since becoming a vegan, I've been dying to check out Lazy Acres Market. It's a grocery store in downtown Santa Barbara that carries "wholesome, natural, and organic foods." Sounds perfect, right? The problem is, well... Lazy Acres isn't the only one who's lazy, and I live within walking distance of the Isla Vista Coop.

I had this afternoon "free" (I should have been grading papers, but I figure grocery shopping doesn't really count as procrastination), so I decided to hit up Lazy Acres. First I checked out their website to see if they were having any specials, and much to my delight, today was "Lazy Thursday."

Every Thursday at Lazy Acres, students and seniors get a 10% discount. They also have a bunch of items that are marked down a bit on Thursdays. What luck! The name "Lazy Thursday" obviously brought to mind the 2005 Saturday Night Live Digital Short "Lazy Sunday."

The only thing I love more than 10% student discounts is the brilliance of Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island, so as I headed downtown I was feeling great. I even listened to "Lazy Sunday" on the drive, just to get in the mood.

As I used Google Maps on my phone to figure out where on earth Lazy Acres was, I remembered the lyrics: "Google Maps is the best!" / "True dat!" / "DOUBLE TRUE!" Google Maps is the best, and it got me to Lazy Acres in about 20 minutes.

I felt excited and overwhelmed as soon as I stepped into Lazy Acres. It just looked so much fancier than a regular grocery store. I think as a general rule, the word "market" (not preceded by "super") indicates a certain level of class. I was particularly struck by how colorful the produce section was:

I wanted to eat everything in the whole store. But I knew I had to be choosy. The student discount was, after all, only 10% off. I got the basics like almond milk and whole grain bread, but I couldn't help being tempted by the vast selection of produce. I felt inspired.

I grabbed a plantain and a yucca root to combine with the avocado I still have from Plow to Porch. I wanted to make an Ecuador-style dinner. When I was visiting my sister in Ecuador two summers ago, pretty much every meal we ate consisted of some combination of plantain, yucca, and avocado. In Ecuador, we found the avocados outside on the ground, we used the yucca Katie grew in her backyard, and we paid about one cent for each plantain. Here I was, paying $3/lb for the same ingredients at a trendy organic market in Santa Barbara. I am nervous about misusing the word "ironic," but I'm pretty sure this situation qualified.

I also decided to try some "chicken nuggets" that are really chicken-free. I am generally grossed out by the idea of fake meat, but this fake meat looked delicious on the box. (I realize that judging frozen foods by how they look on the box is a less-than-sound way to make purchasing decisions.)

But the product I was most interested in trying was the vegan chocolate mousse. It's made of raw young coconut milk, organic virgin coconut oil, organic dates, and organic raw cacao. I still had a Tupperware full of soy frozen yogurt in my freezer, so I bought the chocolate mousse for the purpose of putting on top of the fro yo. It was a heavenly combination.

In conclusion, I'm going back next week for more "Lazy Thursday" groceries. Lazy Acres might not be "The Chronic-what!-cles of Narnia," but it's a dreamworld of magic in its own crazy-delicious way.