Julie Hasson’s steamed seitan sausages have been calling my name for weeks now and who am I to deny a sausage? I actually purchased a new (and needed) steamer just for the occasion. And wow, just wow. What a great method steaming turned out to be!

This is one of the reasons that I sometimes get frustrated with “vegan secrets.” I’ve written about it a little before and I know it comes across as bisque-y, but the reason behind it is nothing but nice. When you have a great new method for, oh, I don’t know, meringue or frosting or mayo- why not share it? I mean, for free - the way Julie has in her video. People will still support you and buy your cookbook, in fact, they might be more apt to buy your cookbook because of recipes they’ve tried from a blog or where ever. My book sales aren’t hurting because the chickpea cutlet recipe is all over the internet.

But besides just increasing book sales, the experience of collaboration can be rewarding as you watch the recipe morph with every kitchen it passes through. It’s like a game of telephone, except at the end you’ll hopefully have an awesome sausage and not a sentence like “You have titty owls on your head.” But what I’m saying is that in collaboration there is community, in community there is strength. In strength there is…I don’t know. But you get the idea, don’t you? Sharing can only help vegan cuisine.

Speaking of morphing, I did deviate from the original recipe to reflect the way I usually cook. Since my steamer could only fit 4 sausages, I had to change the quantities. I also wanted to try to get a little more texture out of them, so I added some mashed pinto beans for a little Mexican flair. The result is a really nice, slightly spicy sausage that would go well with chorizo type dishes. Really, as Julie says in her cooking video, the variations you could come up with are endless. People on the PPK forums have had good luck with their own variations, including an Apple Sage one that I’d like to hit up someday soon.

Spicy Pinto Sausages

Makes 4 big sausages

1/2 cup pinto beans, rinsed and drained

1 cup vegetable broth

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 cloves garlic, grated (with a microplane, or very finely minced)

1 1/4 cups vital wheat gluten

1/4 cup nutritional yeast

1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seed, crushed

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 teaspoon sweet paprika

1 teaspoon dried oregano

Several dashes fresh black pepper

Before mixing your ingredients, get your steaming apparatus ready, bring water to a full boil. The rest of the recipe comes together very quickly.

Have ready 4 sheets of tin foil. In a large bowl, mash the pinto beans until no whole ones are left. Throw all the other ingredients together in the order listed and mix with a fork. Divide dough into 4 even parts (an easy way to do this: split the dough in half and then into quarters). Place one part of dough into tin foil and mold into about a 5 inch log. Wrap dough in tin foil, like a tootsie roll. Don’t worry too much about shaping it, it will snap into shape while it’s steaming because this recipe is awesome.

Place wrapped sausages in steamer and steam for 40 minutes. That’s it! You can unwrap and enjoy immediately or refrigerate until ready to use. I refrigerated some of mine in wrappers and some out of wrappers to see if there would be a difference, but there really wasn’t. They’re really great sliced up and lightly sauteed, and this weekend I’ll be trying them on pizzas.

Check out Julie’s video and see just how easy these are. Thank you, Julie! I love you! <3<3<3 Also - you have titty owls on your head.

The boys at Chicago Soy Dairy have been hard at work on their latest product, a vegan cheese called Teese. I have high hopes for this stuff, and I’ll be testing it in my oven at a pizza party next weekend. Until then, you can watch it melt in a pizza oven to a back drop of “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” As if we needed Scorpion to make the melting soy cheese seem exciting!

Teese is being served at a few restaurants in Chicago but not yet available to individual consumers. Hopefully it will be soon! If you have an eatery that serves soy cheese in your hood let them know about this new cheese or contact swade@welovesoy.com and he can get in touch.

All praise to Paula for giving me the title of this blog entry.

Now stop rubbing it in everyone else’s face! The fair and beautiful Katie, who just transplanted her fine self from Chicago to Portland, has been posting the most tempting confections from her new workplace - SweetPea Bakery in the famed Portland mini-mall.

Not to mention one off color cake:

And to add insult to injury, she has announced that SweetPea is offering all you can eat vegan brunch. Okay, Portland. We get it. You win. Now stop showing off, already. It’s tacky.

Details from Lisa SweetPea

“Hi Friends!

xoxo
-lisa”

Compassion Over Killing is suing United Egg Producers for consumer fraud over the labeling of egg cartons. For years they were giving the cartons a self-congratulatory and disingenuous “Animal Care Certified” stamp of approval, when really it was just their stamp of approval. Think Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” sign. And now, despite the fact that it is illegal for them to do so, UEP is still using the logo.

We shouldn’t be eating eggs at all, but while a large majority of Americans are eating eggs, I’m happy that groups like COK are fighting for the chickens with any legal avenue they’ve got. This brings attention to the issues a little bit better than a fake tanned woman in a bikini does and maybe consumers (or, people buying stuff as it were) will wise up to the fact that they are being lied to. Of course, most still won’t really care, but it would be a step in the right direction.

For instance, every single egg producer (and when I say egg producer, I don’t mean the chickens, I mean the people “keeping” the chickens) kills the male chicks either by gas or suffocation or grinding them up, because the boy chicks are mostly useless. Yes, even those nice people at the farmers market practice this. Not to mention that the laying hens are killed at 8 to 18 months because they are “spent”. So where are your humane eggs now? Huh? Huh? I am shoulder shoving you and asking. Even in the best situations these are the bare minimum facts, and that is not even mentioning what a bunch of malarchy free range is.

Anyway, please don’t argue with me in the comments about how you have a chicken sent by god in your backyard that begs for you to eat her eggs. Just bite the bullet, go vegan and leave me alone. It isn’t that hard and it’s really fun! See how much fun I’m having?!

No restaurant review today, just a little reminder to tell you to skip dinner and eat a Sweet And Sara S’more instead. Holy cats, these things are forking insane. I was all getting ready to talk to someone on the phone today and I took a bite of the S’more, thinking I could just talk on the phone and wait to take another bite. No. I emailed him and said I needed half an hour.

Picture from the Sweet and Sara website, I was too busy eating mine to photograph it

It’s a buttery toasty tasting graham cracker, with a big scoop of luscious marshmallow, all dipped in dark chocolate. Everything about it is just perfect. The marshmallow is the just right amount of fluffy and toothsome, and the sweetness is not cloying, it’s just enough to let you know that you’re indulging. These things are running 4.49 at Whole Foods, and I gotta’ say, even though I kind of almost put it back because of the price tag, they are worth it. There’s also a peanut butter flavor, but fork that - I think original is where it’s at.

I know that Sara worked her ass off to get this recipe just right, and bless her soul, she did it. Mazel tov, girl! Check the Sweet And Sara website for how to get them. I got mine at the Whole Foods on Houston Street.

In other non-local news, AngelFood of Auckland New Zealand will be selling a marshmallow making kit for 10 dollars NZ (not sure what that translates to here, and too lazy to google it). It sounds like fun and I’ll review it on the blog in a few weeks.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay”

-Robert Frost

And so it goes with scrambled tofu in Brooklyn. One day it’s there, the next day the restaurant is boarded up or just plumb stopped serving it. But the good news is that new places to find it pop up all the time, and the cycle of life continues.

It’s rough all over, Ponyboy. But scrambled tofu makes it easier.

My latest pilgrimage to tofuland was Flatbush Farm. There’s a lot of hoopla surrounding this place, so I was kind of expecting something awesome. Instead I got something pretty forking good, and I can’t complain. Their scrambled tofu ($10) was from the heavily curried school of scrambles, with little flecks of red that could have been either tomato or red pepper, they were too small to tell. It came with a side of tangy stewed collards, which were melt in your mouth yummy, and whole grain grilled bread. On the side I ordered hash browns ($5) which ended up being the sleeper hit. I love when a dish makes you think, and I have to say, if it’s a potato dish that makes you think, all the better. I have no idea how they did this! It was casserolish, baked and sliced into thick wedges. With potatoes I never want obtrusive flavors, I really just want potato, and you can tell that Flatbush Farm used good high quality ones that needed very little fanfare. Perfect.

Magical hash browns

Service was really speedy and friendly, and good about answering vegan questions. I think our food was on the table within five minutes of ordering, that’s really how you know you’re not in a vegan restaurant. The dining room is nice and sparse, with high ceilings and black plank floors. A good solid place for brunch I will definitely be returning to.

One thing that was funny, whatever font they use makes it look like their scrambled tofu is 18 bucks instead of 10. I was prepared to try it for 18, if that gives you any insight into the sorry state of vegan brunch in Brooklyn.

Flatbush F A R M

Sure, maybe the french fry is the vegan french fry, but roasted brussel sprouts are a near second. And Brussels is really close to France, so it makes sense. I know I don’t shut up about roasted brussels, I’ve blogged about them and they are in VwaV as well as Veganomicon, but they deserve it. They smell like popcorn while they’re roasting and you can kind of mindlessly eat them while watching TV or studying - they are the perfect snack food.

To roast them, preheat the oven to 400 F. Slice off the knobby bottoms and peel off any out of shape leaves. Slice in half, place on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and toss to coat. Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, flipping once. Easy as pie. Actually, much much much easier than pie.

Say hello to my little friend 

Brooklyn is woefully behind the times with vegan food. I mean, compared to Nebraska it’s aight, but being so close to Manhattan you would think that some of the magic would rub off. Instead, mostly the decidedly unvegan stuff rubs off, so here we are with a few dozen places that serve octopus salad or rabbit medallions, not to mention the 3K a month studio apartments, and hardly a tempeh reuben to be found. Jerks. So this week I’m going to post a review a day, sampling the best, the worst and the mediocrest that the BK has to offer.

On the rainiest day we’ve had in years, Jason Das and I scurried over to a new place called Earth Tonez. I was hopeful about this place, it’s located just down the street from the future Brooklyn ‘sNice (more about that later this week) so it had better be good, especially if their specialty is sandwiches. The sandwich and salad descriptions looked promising, if lacking in innovation. I would love to have a decent Caesar salad in the neighborhood. But it turns out that their fake chicken wasn’t even vegan, so there goes half the menu items. And, if it’s not obvious from that last sentence, most of their offerings were of the fake meat variety and so could be whipped up at home for much cheaper.

Which brings me to the next problem, the 9 and a half dollar sandwich. I settled on the Bada Bing, which the really nice owner recommended. It was store bought veggie sausage with marinara sauce, unmelted soy cheese and sauteed peppers sitting on a pile of blue corn chips. And it was 9 and a half dollars. It came with a tiny ramekin of a corn avocado salad but I don’t know that this was even standard. Jason got the Philly Cheese steak which was seitan and cheese. Decent enough, less expensive than my sandwich, and they obviously put care into the sandwich making, but not impressive enough to keep us from going to ’sNice when it does indeed open.

This sandwich is ok, but is it 9.50 okay?

The owner (who, as I said, was really nice!) was fiddling around with a Red Mango Bakery cake when we got there, so of course we finished our meal with a slice. Unfortunately, they don’t even serve real coffee, which was another minus, because it really would have helped. We picked a Chocolate Chai cake, and it must have been sitting around for a few weeks because the flavor was there but it was really dry and tasted a bit of fridge. So. That sort of sucked.

It’s a new place so I hope they step up their game, offer more vegan options and vary their menu. Lose the stunt meat, up the veggies and beans and homemade sandwich fillings. Maybe add a side to make the just-shy-of-ten-bucks price tag worth it; potato salad or a pasta salad, something cheap but satisfying. The things it has going for it are friendly staff, reasonably priced muffins and cookies (but with no coffee?) and a nice space with exposed brick and tin ceilings. I will give it another try, but not for a few months. And after seeing this review they might clock me one if I enter, so maybe I better not. But if fake meat sandwiches are your deal then maybe you would absolutely love this place as is.

Nice people means repeat customers, even with the problems

I couldn’t find any online info for Earth Tonez- not even a MySpace or blog or anything, but click the thumbnails for the menu. It has a very odd tagline: Healthy Alternatives For The Meat Eater. Maybe that’s part of the problem?

You know, Chad at Food Fight gets to blog three times a day just by google-newsing “vegan” and then linking to whatever or just by walking next door to Sweet Pea and seeing what kind of cupcakes they have. Not fair! Some of us have to put actual thought into what we blog about, and so yes, it might take a month to get that shnit together. But fork it. Here’s the vegan minute completely culled from the Post Punk Kitchen message boards: where vegans in the know don’t go. (I just made that up)

Bob Barker’s Enchilada Bake

Because Bob “My Boyfriend” Barker just donated a million bucks to an animal rights program at his alma mater why don’t you make his semi-homemade recipe.

Vegan Etsy Team

I guess all the vegan Etsy sellers banded together and formed some sort of elite internet cadre. This will be helpful for those of us who love to search for “vegan” in every website we go to. Have you ever searched for “vegan” in the “by name” advanced search option of IMDB? Then you know who this guy is.

More Twigs & Berries Zine 

Another new vegan zine from deep in the heart of Canada with some really tempting looking recipes. Stop being a cheapskate and buy it for yourself and your loved ones.

Is Ecstasy Even Vegan? 

If you’re looking for love behind bars, this may be your dream date. It’s a short read about a vegan inmate in Brooklyn getting sent to England so that his diet can be accommodated. But it is so much more than that.

And I leave you with a picture of my new niece Norah and my old sister Michelle. Just because I hate blogging with no pictures. I have such blogging integrity!

People always think that Sarah and I have some sort of competition going on. And you know what? They’re right! And so we’re going to settle things once and for all the old fashioned way…with a nutritional yeast snorting contest. Now, she is at somewhat of an unfair advantage. I mean, have you seen the nostrils on that girl? But I think with enough practice I can give her a run for her colorful Canadian money. Unfortunately, the only thing I have to practice with is a couple of grams of pure cocaine, so expect a lot of blogging in the coming weeks.

I’m not sure how we’re gonna do this, but it’s gonna get doned.

Is Sarah using those two fingers to ready her nostrils? 

Just whose side is Josh Hooten on?