(Swedish) Pakistani Stew

I’m on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, visiting one of my best friends from college, Victoria. One of our other best friends, Kinley, showed up a couple days ago and we’ve been reliving our glory days: staying out way too late and making Victoria’s mom come pick us up after last call. It’s a bit embarrassing. The only difference is that now one of us is married (ugh… Kinley…) and we’re all approximately 20% less fun.

I can’t complain. Right now, I’m sitting in a lounge chair next to the pool with my laptop sticking to the tops of my thighs which, like the rest of my sunburned body, are steadily accumulating a slimy film of sweat. It’s awesome.

Why, you might ask, don’t I just take advantage of the similarly hot and sunny weather where I live, in Santa Barbara? The answer, I suppose, is that this type of relaxation is addictive. If I give myself one beach day at home, I will never return from the beach and, consequently, never finish my graduate degree. Give me an inch and I take a mile, you know how it goes with me.

In addition to being my first Florida vacation in years, this is also my first time being a house guest as a vegan. My original strategy was to prepare a vegan dish for everyone else to try along with their normal-people meal, but that strategy has been derailed.

That’s because Victoria’s mother, Martha, discovered a vegetarian Swedish cookbook that had been gifted to her years ago when one of her cousins went through a week-long vegetarian phase. Martha is Colombian, but she learned Swedish for love about thirty years ago and so she went about translating a few vegan recipes I might be interested in.

We settled on the recipe for Pakistani Stew. Well, it’s what Swedish people perceive as Pakistani Stew. If you're getting bored of this blog post, and if you happen to understand Swedish, feel free to just use the recipe below:

The best part about this meal, other than that it tasted wonderful, was that we all got to participate in preparing it. Martha translated the (rather simple) Swedish directions aloud in her Spanish-accented English and we all got to work.

Here’s what we did:

(Swedish) Pakistani Stew

¼ head white cabbage
1 head cauliflower
2 carrots
1 onion, diced
4 potatoes, diced
1 can whole tomatoes
1 packet frozen peas
4 tbsp olive oil
½ tbsp cumin
½ tbsp cinnamon
2 cups water salt to taste
cilantro to taste

We chopped up the cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, onion, and potatoes, and tossed them into a pot to cook in olive oil on medium heat. It took about ten minutes of stirring for them to become rather tender:

Then we added the peas (a “packet” is obviously a vague amount of peas, but we all like peas so I just dumped in an entire frozen bag), tomatoes, cumin, and cinnamon.

After stirring that all together, we added two cups of water and a handful of salt (Martha told me, “Look away!” as she poured in a ridiculous generous amount of salt) and let the whole thing simmer for ten more minutes.

We served it over the leftover quinoa from the meal I had made the night before, and it was delicious. I have never combined cumin and cinnamon before, but now that I’ve tried it, it seems like an obvious combination.

Everyone went back for second helpings, and Kinley ate the leftovers for breakfast the following morning. In fact, she's eating them right now, and washing them down with a Bloody Mary. Being married makes you so weird.

Fun with Florets: Baked Cauliflower with Mushrooms

I get a kick out of words, and I get an even bigger kick out of absurdly specific words. For example, “defenestration” – the act of throwing something or someone out a window – usually only comes up in conversations about Renaissance politics in Prague (or after watching this video).

The word “cete,” which I recently discovered while playing Words With Friends, refers to a group of badgers. I can’t imagine a situation in which I would have to use the word “cete,” but when it happens, I will be delighted.

“Floret” is another one of those too-specific words; it is rarely used, except by people whose job it is to write menus for fancy restaurants. It really only gets used in reference to broccoli or cauliflower. Of the two, broccoli is definitely more prominent in my diet; in fact, I can’t remember the last time I ate cauliflower… before today.

I wanted to invent a dish that would use up the mushrooms I had acquired last week in a misguided spur-of-the-moment grocery purchasing decision. I don’t particularly like mushrooms, at least not enough to make them the star ingredient in a meal, so I figured baking them into a cauliflower-combo dish would make the most of them.

Vegan Baked Cauliflower with Mushrooms
(makes four servings)


1 cauliflower
2 tbsp olive oil
5 garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp sea salt
¼ tsp organic sugar
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
½ white onion, chopped
1 cup mushrooms, chopped
½ cup Daiya mozzarella-style shreds

First, I preheated the over to 350 degrees. While it was heating up, I got to break the cauliflower into florets. It was quite fun; I ended up getting carried away and breaking it up into smaller and smaller cute little pieces that I decided to call florettes.

Then I just dumped all the ingredients in a big bowl together and mixed them up as best I could. I wasn’t sure about the proportions at all. I was nervous that five cloves of garlic might be too much (although “too much” is not really in my garlic-related vocabulary), and I wasn’t sure what the sugar would do. I’ve started adding sugar to soy sauce and mustard when I make sauce for grilled veggies, but it might not work the same way when combined with vinegar and garlic.

It was a risk. Worst case scenario, I would just defenestrate the whole thing. I was hoping it wouldn't come to that.

I spread the mixture into a glass baking dish, like so:

… and baked it for 40 minutes, checking on it and giving it a stir every ten minutes or so. After 40 minutes, I pulled it out of the oven, sprinkled on the Daiya cheese, and stuck it back in for a few more minutes.

The Daiya melted all over it and it tasted so good. The mushroom and balsamic combination worked out well, the sugar didn't get in the way, and it definitely wasn't too garlicky.

The florets were flavorful and stayed fenestrated (which, I imagine, is the opposite of defenestrated), so I count it as a success.