December 2007 Archives

In preparation for the morning after New Year's Eve, we've been scouring our brains and books for something new and different. What we came up with was a newfangled application for an 80-year-old organism: Madam Yellott's heirloom sourdough start. Meagan’s used this sourdough start to make some of the best cinnamon rolls we've ever gorged upon...so we thought of making something a little more savory.

Once you get your hands on a solid sourdough start, this recipe is a snap and infinitely variable. Stuff the dough with whatever you like: Kale and Garlic, Chard and Roquefort, anything will be awesome.

Happy New Year!

Dough

1 cup wet sourdough start
1 egg (optional, but somewhat essential)
1 Tsp. salt
1 Tsp. baking powder
1 Tsp. baking soda
1 cup all purpose flour
1/3 cup canola oil
1 Tbs. Brewers yeast

1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands.

2. On a (very) well floured surface, knead the dough with vigor for about five minutes.

3. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin (or a pint glass if you haven't one) to form a large rectangle, with the dough approximately 1/16th of an inch thick.

Filling

3 Tbs. butter (or vegan margarine)
5 shallots, peeled and sliced thin
1/4 cup cream sherry
2 Tbs. Sherry wine vinegar
1 cup of picked and chopped dill
1 cup shredded aged cheese (we used Roncal)
Salt and Pepper

4. Brown those shallots! Toast them dry in a nonstick pan or a cast iron on medium high heat, and then add the butter. When the butter is bubbling and just starting to brown, crank the heat to high and add the sherry and the vinegar. Cook until most of the liquid has evaporated, about five minutes.

5. Spread the sherry butter shallot goo all over the giant dough square on your counter. Make sure to spread evenly all the way to the edges.

6. Apply the dill and the cheese in a similar fashion; evenly distribute all the way tot he corners of your dough sheet.

7. Sprinkle salt, grind pepper all over the thing. and pre-heat your oven to 350.

8. As if it were, that’s right, a joint: carefully roll the rectangle into itself. start at the bottom and curl inwards until you have a bulging log. Use a sharp knife and slice your rolls off of the left side of the log. You can make them as thick as you'd like, ours were about 1.5" thick.

9. Gingerly place the rolls side by each in a greased (with butter) baking pan and bake for approximately 15 minutes. You want the edges of the rolls to brown.

Beverage: Black Flag Imperial Stout
Soundtrack: Inca Ore's Birds in the Bushes

We like to file this recipe adaptation under the ‘My-kid-just-went-vegetarian-what-do-we-make-for-Christmas-dinner?’ category. Because that’s exactly how we started making it. After all, back in the ’90s, before Food Network and Google booted the Joy of Cooking, the conundrum of cooking for a vegetarian at holidays usually meant dusting off the Moosewood Cookbook. In our case, mom seized on some god awfully named recipe for “Nut Cheese Balls.”

But ever since, a loose adaptation of that recipe has stuck with us. It’s basically a dish of nut and cheese patties twice baked and topped with a béchamel sauce. It’s fatty and far from vegan, but for those who eat dairy, or make exceptions for the holidays, it’s one more great anti-Tofurkey entrée — like a stuffing, fake meat cutlets and eggnog all baked into one… Stuffing Cutlets… Stufflets.

Nut-Cheese Balls

1 1/2 cups walnuts, ground
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
1 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 cup parsley, chopped
1 Tbs. dried sage
1 Tbs. dried thyme
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp. fresh ground black pepper
1 cup organic whole milk
2 cage-free, veg-fed eggs

1. Pre-heat your oven to 370 degrees while you prepare your nut-cheese mixture.

2. Using a food processor or blender, grind your walnuts to a fine powder and place mixture in a large mixing bowl. Next, shred the cheddar and combine with breadcrumbs to the mixing bowl. Wash and chop parsley, add it too. Season mixture with sage, thyme, salt and pepper. Mix well with your hands.

3. Now add a cup of milk and the two eggs, mixing thoroughly.

4. Grease a deep baking pan with olive oil or cooking spray. Spoon out large balls or medium-sized patties of the nut-cheese mixture. Place them in the baking pan like you would do cookie dough.

5. Cover pan with aluminum foil and bake for approximately 30 minutes, or until crisping at the edges but still gooey to the touch. Set aside, still covered, until béchamel sauce is prepared.

Bechamel Sauce

4 Tbs. butter
4 cloves garlic, minced
4 Tbs. flour
2 1/2 cups organic whole milk (warm)
1/2 white onion
6 whole cloves
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. thyme
1 tsp. cayenne pepper

6. In a medium saucepan, put the butter on medium heat and add minced garlic. Saute for about five minutes.

7. Once butter bubbles have subsided and garlic is smelling nutty, make a roux by adding a tablespoon of flour at a time, whisking thoroughly to keep from over-clumping. Once all flour is added, slowly whisk in warm milk about half a cup at a time.

8. Cut a white onion in half so that the petals stay intact as one piece. Take the cloves and punch them through the outer layer of onion so they stick embedded in it. Add your onion half, complete with cloves, into the liquid. Season with nutmeg, thyme, salt and cayenne pepper. Bring liquid up to a slow boil and turn down heat, simmering for at least 15 more minutes.

9. When ready to finish dish, pour béchamel sauce over top the baking pan of nut-cheese patties. Sauce should almost cover them, but try to save about a half cup of warm béchamel for added garnish. Bake for another 20 minutes or just until sauce is bubbling. Serve with a squirt of fresh béchamel on the plate.

Beverage: Great Divide’s Old Ruffian Barleywine-style ale
Soundtrack: Fiery Furnaces’ “Slavin’ Away”

It is Christmas Eve, heathens. Time to make a chestnut fire, a batch of fresh bread and don wool socks. Of course, that can be a tall order if you have to, oh, say, work around the clock or spend Christmas apart from dudes and family. Our fallback many a winter — the only thing we’ve found that can replace the holiday cheer of mom attempting vegan cookies or skipping church to make snow angels in your parent’s yard — has been seasonal ales, big bombers of winter beer and frothy Christmas specials. At the risk of sounding like depressed alkies who lean on a bottle for Christmas spirit, consider that the perfect winter beer will offer the triumvirate mentioned above: chestnuts and fresh bread in the palate, and enough booze to keep your feet (and soul) warm. So, here’s a first stab at some of the better winter beers we’ve had this December, with more to come. More importantly, it’s not too late to run out and grab a couple as stocking stuffers…

St. Bernardus Christmas Ale

A light molasses pour, fluff bubbles with waft of carbo-buzz, subtle roasted chestnuts and malt sugar undertones — this is a safe-bet table-pleaser. Whereas some of the St. Bernardus brews are the idyllic frothy beverage emitted from the barrel around the neck of a life-saving St. Bernard, this Christmas ale is like the candy cane mead swigged by a naughty, Belgian shopping mall Santa.

Dairy Pairy: Saenkanter Gouda
Soundtrack: Dandy Warhol’s “Little Drummer Boy”

Avery’s Old Jubilation Ale

You know the old Budweiser ads with steeds pumping their sinewy leg muscles through snow and ice with a Bud sleigh behind ‘em? Now get ready for the real thing. This Colorado brewery’s winter ale is a standout for one reason: they don’t go sprinkling spices in their kegs like they’re baking holiday ho-hos — just a strong mahogany syrup made of five malts, no added herbs, and lots of nutty mellowness. One of the better meal pints this year; it won’t mess with your perfectly spiced vegan pig loin.

Dairy Pairy: Ossau-Iraty
Soundtrack: Spiritualized’s “Oh Happy Day”

Deschutes’ Jubel

Oregon flagship brewers went all ‘Peace On Earth’ with this year’s holiday brew. It’s a rare attempt at even-handed hopping and malting. Flowery juniper pine-sol hits first, crystal clear sipping upfront, then rounded out by a robust, if jumbled, baker’s chocolate and oven-scented malts after-taste. Good, not great, but still plenty worth serving to weaker-budded buddies.

Dairy Pairy: Fig cake
Soundtrack: Bright Eye’s “Road to Joy”

Alesmith’s Yulesmith Holiday Ale

It feels like just yesterday that we were scarfing blistered peanuts, diving for cover from the neighborhood kids’ firecracker wars and glugging on the red-and-blue tinted Alesmith Hoilday ale for Fourth of July. Now we’re decking the halls with their other holiday seasonal and ‘tis the mother f-ing season. This bomber pours red-copper brown like a rusty faucet and tastes like a malt wreath fell in your double IPA. Style-wise, Yulesmith is actually a bit like Jubel: malty and hoppy at once, but they pull it off with flying colors.

Dairy Pairy: Tuxford And Tebbet's Mature Black Wax Cheddar
Soundtrack: Belle and Sebastian’s “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

N’Ice Chouffe

How do goblins celebrate Christ’s birth, you might ask? Well the ones behind the Belgian Brewerie d’Anchouffe throw a bunch of orange peel and fresh thyme in their batches of brown ale and let it get spicy. At a recent house party we stuck a bottle of this elfin nectar in the freezer and pulled it out just as ice was starting to congregate around the bottle. Corked and poured, this beer came out a muddy, herby slurpy. The thyme coulda been stronger for us garden geeks, but the citrus was perfectly balanced against medicinal malt notes. A good 750 ml for late-night Christmas shopping runs or Home Alone-style holiday heists, perhaps, or of course outdoor fire parties with gnomes.

Dairy Pairy: Boulette d'Avesnes, washed with beer and spices
Soundtrack: Grandaddy’s “Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland”

There are few perceivable pillars of French cooking that are as widely and voraciously loved as scalding hot onion soup cloaked in a blistering layer of melted gruyere. Like many of the epic French dishes that cannonnize the cuisine of rural folk vegetarians usually remain wholly uninvited. How does one mitigate that beef stock in every single recipe of the gooest of soups?

Simple: Beer.

After trying small batches of all three colors fo the French tricolore, we settled on Chimay Blue; a dubbel style beer thats a houshold name for boozers. We also went too far in trying an earlier version of this plot...it was bad. But the Grade Reserve, or any other basic Dubbel, can become a super substitute for reduced animal gore. The malts and sugars eaak out a strikingly similar flavor when combined with all the wonderful juices of way to many onions.

Soup

2 Tbs. of butter
2 Tbs. of extra virgin olive oil
3 large onions halved and sliced thin
6 cloves of garlic
4 shallots
2 cups of Chimay Grande Reserve
4 cups of vegetable stock
4 bay leaves
6 sprigs of thyme
½ tsp ground white pepper

1. Heat a medium sized pot on medium heat. Add the butter and let it blister.

2. Add the onion and cook uncovered. Let them sit for about four minute and then stir. Repeat until the onions have all begun to brown.

3. Add the olive oil, garlic and shallots and stir in the same fashion as before, one every five minutes, until the garlic an shallots have caramelized.

4. Add the beer, crank the heat to just shy of high. Let the beer boil off until there is ½ as much beer volume as onion volume.

5. Add the stock, bay leaves, thyme, and white pepper. Cook until the liquid has reduced by about two finger-widths. Taste the soup and add salt to adjust. Cook for at least an addidional 20 minutes before garnishing (below). In an ideal world, you should let the soup sit a day before serving it.

To Serve

4-6 slices of a crusty bread
2 cups shredded gruyere cheese

Keeping it Vegan

The same crusty bread
1 Tbs. of brewers yeast for each slice of bread
1 Tbs. of extra virgin olive oil for each slice of bread

1. Ladle your soup into oven safe receptacles, being mindful to leave one finger-width for your cheesy or cheese-free toasts.

2. Float the toast in the center of each bowl and cover with cheese. If you wanna do it vegan; douse toast with the olive oil.

3. Pop the bowls under the broiler either in your oven or your toaster oven, and broil until the cheese is bubbly and brown, or the olive oil slicked bread turns golden. Garnish with pinches of salt, and brewers yeast if appropriate.

4. Don’t burn your tongue.

Beverage: De Proef's Flemish Primative Ale
Soundtrack: Metal Urbain’s Hysterie Connective

Our friends Ali and Evan who opened a bike-friendly, veggie-heavy café in Northeast Portland this summer recently asked us to develop the “ultimate vegan breakfast sandwich” for their expanding menu. The only requirements were that it be fairly easy and inexpensive to recreate in a commercial kitchen, that it be vegan, obviously, and that it do justice to some nutso all-female roller skating dance troupe that they were thinking of naming the sammy after.

So, last weekend the Hot Knives Test Kitchen got to work. It wasn’t hard to come up with the condiments, stacking ingredients and such. We are partial to creamy spreads, so we whipped up a dill aioli out of vegan mayo. Next came the mock meat component, where we quickly settled on maple tempeh bacon. Every sandwich needs a fresh veggie and a cooked veggie, so we went for thick-sliced heirloom tomatoes and rather than the obvious spinach, we went with sautéd kale in a little soy sauce and shallots.

Last but not least we needed the anchor of the sandwich that would replace the egg. We narrowed the field down to two variations of the same idea: a mock fried egg sandwich that relied on the gooiness of a handmade polenta and made two competing sammies: Sandwich A was a patty of firm, seasoned polenta fried off to order; Sandwich B centered around a fried tomato topped with much wetter polenta that mimicked Hollandaise. Both were sickly good, although we preferred A because it was a lot easier to eat. As for which one may end up on the Little Red Bike Café menu, well, it’s not up to us, but you can check here in coming months to see if either made the cut!

Ultimate Breakfast Sandwich Ingredients

1 Tbs. vegan margarine
4 cloves garlic, miced
4 crimin mushrooms
1 tsp. fresh thyme
3 cups water
1 cube vegetable bullion
1 cup course grain polenta
pinch of kosher salt
pinch of fresh black pepper
2 3-inch strips of tempeh
1 Tbs. maple syrup
1 tsp smoked salt
1 tsp paprika
1 Tbs. olive oil
1/2 cup kale, washed
1 shallot, minced
1 clove garlic, mined
1 Tbs. soy sauce
1 Tbs. vegan mayonnaise
1 tsp. fresh dill
1 Ciabatta bun, or any crispy/chewy roll

Sandwich A

1. Start by making your polenta patty. Place a medium saucepan on high heat with margarine, add garlic, sliced mushrooms and thyme and suate for about 3 minutes. Bring your water to boil in a teapot and add two cups only to the saucepan. Toss in bullion and bring back to a boil, stir.

2. Now whisk in your polenta slowly and bring down heat to medium. Cook like this, whisking every so often, for about 30-40 minutes or until thick like a rich batter. If it seems too thin, add a couple pinched more of polenta. (It will continue to thicken when cool.) Then remove from heat and immediately transfer polenta to a tall rammequin. Let it cool until firm, in the freezer it takes about 15-20 minutes.

3. In the meantime, fry up your tempeh bacon: put your paprika and smoked sat on a small plate, your maple syrup in a small bowl. Dip each slice of tempeh in maple syrup and then drop in dry spices. Then in a small pan, fry in a small amount of oil until maple syrup caramelizes to a dark brown. Set aside.

4. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil to blanche your kale leaves. Dunk them for 30 seconds and then drop them straight into an ice bath to keep them green. Then sauté your washed, cut kale leaves in the same pan with oil, shallots and soy until tender like sautéd spinach. Set aside.

5. Prepare aioli by mixing chopped dill with vegan mayo.

6. Once all components are ready, bring out your chilled polenta cake and remove from rammequin. Slice off one 1-inch thick slab and cook in your sauté pan with another 1 Tbs. of vegan margarine on medium heat just until slightly browning on outside and molten inside.

Sandwich B

1. Prepare your polenta Hollandaise by bringing all three cups of water to a boil. Add bullion cube, stir. Cook on medium heat, whisking every couple of minutes for 40 minutes. Polenta should behave like slop. Season as desired. Keep on low heat until ready to serve.

2. Prepare dill aioli, maple tempeh bacon and sautéd kale as described above.

3. Fry a tomato slice, a 1-inch thick slab, in a small sauté pan with a touch of olive oil. Season as desired. Flip and cook 1 minute on each side. Serve as main component with polenta covering the rest of the sandwich layers. Use a fork.

Beverage: Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Breakfast Stout
Soundtrack: Animal Collective’s “Whaddit I Done”

With any luck, Lake Sharp’s widely popular and totally informative vimeo has all you Hot Knives devotees bottling your own pro-biotic elixirs and feeling rad. For those of you that did, you probably have huge, intimidating fungi festering in cabinets verging on frightfully successful sizes; we have another project for you.

After a somewhat passive attempt to grow a vinegar mother from a prodigious looking organ at the bottom of a favorite bottle of acid failed miserably, we asked Lake for a snippet of her Kombucha mother. While we were all a little skeptical that the mother would take to wine, after approximately five weeks we struck liquid gold: home made pro-biotic vinegar. This stuff has all the awesome powers that a bottle of Braggs boasts, with the added bonus of deep and savory wine vinegar flavor. As authentic vinegar geeks, we must declare that we’ve never tasted anything quite like the Oedipal fruits of this shot in the dark d.i.y. Endeavor. While tart enough to evoke all that is needed from store bought acidified wine, this liquid has a low-end that has n’aer to for been experienced. Sherry vinegars mixed with 50-year-old vintages don’t have this kind of bottom line: sweetness of the original liquor is balanced by the almost meaty bi-product of the living organisims feeding on the leftover sugars from the decanted wine. Umami city. All you need is a strong starter mother, ~13 bucks to spend on wine, and 5 weeks worth of patience.

We aren’t stopping here and neither should you. In February we’ll be reporting on Prosecco, Tripel and Stout experiments of the same nature.

Ingredients

A piece of healthy Kombucha Mother
3 bottles of red wine

Equipment

The largest glass jar you can find
A kitchen towel
Twine

1. With clean hands, give the Kombucha mother a nice rinse, and place in your giant jar.

2. Gently add the wine one bottle at a time. When it comes to selecting wines, make sure it something you like to drink. We set a cap at $4.99 per bottle, which usually will find you some decent appellations at the old Trader Joes.

3. When all of the wine has been integrated, give the jar a soft stir with a wooden or plastic spoon. REMEMBER: METAL KILLS MOTHERS, so don’t use any instruments made of metal.

4. Top the jar with a kitchen rag, and tie a piece of twine around the lid. Place the jar in a dark corner of a cupboard that doesn’t experience temperature or moisture variation. Under your sink? Not the best idea. You want to have a stable hospitable environment for your mother to flourish, without encouraging other types of mold to grow.

5. Wait for five weeks.

6. Thirty-five days later, taste your vinegar, using a wooden or plastic spoon. IF it has a pleasant acidic sting, then it’s ready. If not give it another week and try again.

If you take this plunge with us, keep us posted on your progress, and your problems. We’re on our third batch and can answer any questions you have. Take five weeks and never buy vinegar again!

Soundtrack: Five weeks of Ethiopiques
Beverage: Avery’s Old Jubilation

We are not known for luxurious deserts — it’s not our thing. We get too full to fast; we prefer savory salts, the occasional soft, ripe bloomy artisan French cheese, and hard after dinner liquors. We gorge on calories in other ways. But for the holidays, when the fruit cakes and weird chocolate logs start showing up on people’s tables, there are some far easier, awesome ways to serve festive vegan treats and get drunk at the same time. We’ve gotten obsessed with baking apples in apple beer.

The idea — not ours — came from our friend Molly’s grandfather who ran a Brooklyn deli for years and served baby apples baked with cherry cola inside. That grossed us out at first, then it turned us on: Why not slowly roast apples in a beer that already tastes like them, thereby fortifying them with more appleness as well as all the Belgian spice notes of a beer like Unibrou’s Ephemere? To “seal the deal” as it were, we came up with a coriander-spiked pastry crumble to bring out the coriander in the white winter beer. (And to listen to us walk you through the recipe, click here for our recent Good Food appearance.)

Beer Apples

(Serves 6)

6 Fuji apples
2 cups Ephemere apple-spiced beer
6 whole cloves
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 ground walnuts
1 tsp. coriander
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
fresh cilantro leaves for garnish

1. Pre-heat your over to 375 degrees.

2. Core your apples, twisting them out gently with an apple corer, and place them in a long, deep bread pan. They should sit snug so they don’t bob around. Pour 2 cups of beer, which is most of the bottle (just enough for a cup while cooking!), on top of the apples. You’ll want them two-thirds submerged. Put the pan in the oven to roast for about 45 minutes or until softened and starting to get blistery with a slight mushy look. The beer should be reduced by about half.

3. While your apples roast, whip up the simple pastry crust to top ‘em off. Mix softened vegan margarine in a bowl with equal parts flour and sugar and some finely chopped walnuts. Roughly crush the fresh coriander seed in a mortar and pestle and add to the mix. Using a fork push it around into a rustic crumble and finish it off by squeezing in your hands until evenly mixed.

4. Once the apples are ready, pull them out of the oven and stuff them (not too tight) with most of the pastry crumble. What’s left, sprinkle on top and let fall into the reducing beer goo. When you put the apples back in the oven for another 10-12 minutes the crumble will melt into a sugary syrup with the beer.

5. To serve, place one apple on a small desert plate. Spoon some extra beer syrup on the side and drizzled on top, and then garnish with one fresh green cilantro leaf.

Beverage: Unibrou’s Ephemere
Soundtrack: Silver Apples’ “I Have Known Love”

There will always be central aspects of the holiday season that are total bummers. For some its traveling long distances crammed up against smelly strangers in a metal box impossibly cruising tens of thousands of feet above the surface of the planet: screaming children placed at all corners like mentally mutilating motion sensors. Others sweat the savagery of the shopping days with names that smack of biblical plagues, or chug horrendous herbal-speed-sodie-pops to shakingly click on once in a year low prices at ungoldy hours.

Our horror for the holidays is a hydra with one head: Pumpkin Ale. While we like to consider ourselves non-haters, we believe there is a special circle of hell for the makers of oft ubiquitous after October bottles that bear cutesy pictures of harvest squash, jack-o-lanterns, and other autumnal ephemera. When another pie tasting beer pops up in the stead of a truly wonderful winter ale we cry a little…we die a little.

Usually, this blatantly biased and unfair critique is leveled against the most deserving of bummer-breweries. This year the emperor’s unsightly ass was exposed with a suggestion from Alex, the beer buyer and expert-extraordinaire of Red Carpet in Glendale. While staring at the cases, arms filling with brews, we set upon the slightly campy looking bottle to the untrue North. Ichabod Ale will undoubtedly be the only pumpkin ale to grace this blog, graceful commentary in tow. The brew is a very rare seasonal selection from the Alpine Beer Company, when we bought ours a few weeks back there were a rumored three cases in Los Angeles, two of them in front of us.

Why did Ichabod avoid the Axe? Firstly this is no “special release” from Sam Adams. Alpine is a tiny brewery and you can taste the small batch vibe before the beer is in your mouth. The flavors immediately turn towards Flanders, or at least Michigan, where sour and crisp flavors set the stage for what few sugar and spice notes play in the finish. The beer tastes like it’s spent some quality time in beautiful wood barrels nestled in snowdrifts atop pointy hills. The addition of pumpkin in this case is in reverence to the age-old equation of fruit+time=booze. No dribbling of an extract from New Jersey over sterile brew towers for Alpine; which means none of that nonsense for you. You taste the room where this beer was made before you taste the time of the year, and for us that’s the real merry maker.

Dairy Pairy: Senne-flada, an unpasteurised washed rind cows milk cheese from the Swiss Alps.
Soundtrack: Dawn Penn's “No, No, No”

Just like Thanksgiving, the December month is one long, beloved food holiday for us at Hot Knives, even though we typically try hard to disassociate our gluttonous chillin’ from any of the uncomfortable religious undertones. This year, we decided instead to revel in the festive ties to the so-called Holy Land. After all, we have no beef with Jesus, Abraham and friends, or Mohammad. So, this holiday season we’ve been playing with turning holiday favorites both vegan and Middle Eastern, a sort of Pilgrimage to the Tasty Land. And we're getting a jump on it starting now.

During a recent cooking sesh (chronicled in the below video!) we played with the British staple figgy pudding, and reversed the history of colonization by turning it Israeli — the recipe follows too. You can serve the stuff piping hot or room temp almost like a sweet terrine. We put it under grilled pears, but you can just go Jackson Pollack on it by drizzling sweet pomegranate molasses all around it and eating it by itself like a desert. In the video we also toyed with a Christmas (red and green) harissa, as well as a dish we’re calling “Beets Bethlehem” that will follow shortly along with more holiday-related treats.

Figgy Pudding

(Serves 8-10)

2 cups white wine (sweet works well)
2 cups figs (dried)
8 oz. Israeli couscous
1/2 cup vegan margarine
1 Tbs. fresh tarragon
2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1 tsp. all spice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup tahini paste
1 cup raw walnuts
1 tsp. kosher salt

1. To prep, set your oven on 350 degrees and also bring 2 cups of white wine to a near boil. Place your dried figs in a bowl and re-hydrate by covering with the wine. Let those sit for about 10 minutes.

2. Toast the couscous: Empty the bag onto a baking pan and place in the over for 5-8 minutes, shaking pan every couple of minutes to toast evenly. Remove and cool.

3. On the stove, start a medium saucepan over medium heat and add your margarine and tarragon. After a minute or two, add the almond milk and bring to a boil slowly, then toss in all spices and let simmer for about 10 minutes. Stir in the tahini as a thickener. Remove from heat.

4. Drain the figs but save the wine. In a food processor, pulse the figs for a couple seconds to get an uneven chop, not too fine. Dump figs in a large mixing bowl and add the toasted couscous. In the same food processor, pulse about 1 cup of raw walnuts and add those as well. Then pour in creamy liquid, and mix thoroughly, adding about 1/3 cup of the wine as well. Season with salt. The resulting mixture should be gloppy and a little grainy.

5. Line a deep bread pan with wax paper. Melt another 2 Tbs. of margarine and coat the wax paper with it to grease. Pour the figgy mixture in the wax paper-lined pan, cover it with aluminum foil and place the pan inside a wider dish to create a double boiler. Add about 2/3 cup water to the outer dish: the liquid will boil and gently cook the pudding.

6. Bake for about 1 hour at 350 degrees. Check halfway through, refill water if needed. If pudding is too wet after one hour (it should be able to be served in cut squares) simply remove foil and bake with the water-filled pan for another 10 minutes.

7. Once cooked and cool enough to cut, slice in 1-inch thick squares. Serve by itself, or garnish with tarragon and a sweet pomegranate glaze. Or serve underneath a grilled fruit like pears or persimmons (pictured above).

Beverage: Alesmith’s Yuletide Ale (Winter version)
Soundtrack: Primal Scream’s “Little Death”