Trip Report: Charleston

Ben and I have lived less than 300 miles from Charleston for almost eight years and we had never been until last weekend! It's one of those things we would always talk about how we needed to do but never got around to actually doing. We didn't have any plans for Thanksgiving this year, though, and I had one extra vacation day to use up before the end of the year, so we decided to finally go for it.

We stayed at the Mills House Hotel, which was in an absolutely fantastic location right in historic Charleston, kind of on the border between the historic residential and commercial districts.

It was lovely, except the windows are old and our room was on the second floor overlooking two restaurants which apparently have trash pickup every single morning at 6:30 a.m., including Sundays. This meant a lot of super loud crashing noises. So if you ever stay at the Mills House, request a room on the courtyard side.

It was all decked out for Christmas already.

We got there late in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day so we just wandered a bit before heading over to Magnolia's for our Thanksgiving dinner.

My intention was to eat fish but no other meat.  I ordered catfish, in part because it didn't mention any other meats in the description, but the very first bite I took was a big piece of ham hidden in the rice.  Ha!  Oh well.

Ben ordered seafood & grits.

This was a great meal, a perfect start to the trip.

On Friday we spent the entire day wandering around the historic district.  The College of Charleston was nearby.

And there is just amazing, gorgeous architecture everywhere you look.

This is a common thing in Charleston - the door on the street actually just enters onto a wide porch that stretches the length of the house.  We posit this is because in the olden days they had to sleep on the porch because of the heat, maybe?

We thought these people were jerks but then saw on TV that the spiked fence is a relic leftover from the war.

A lot of the big old houses had these stones in front along the street, so they could step up into their carriages!

This is the Nathaniel Russell House, which we actually paid to go inside of for a tour. But no interior photography allowed!

This old post office was pretty cool inside.

This building is supposedly the oldest in Charleston.  1688!

This was just down from our hotel - one of the only buildings still in existence that served as a slave market.

We ate dinner at Poogan's Porch, right next to our hotel, and I failed to take even one picture!  It was also great, though.

On Saturday we got the car out and drove to Drayton Hall Plantation.  There are a lot of plantations you can visit in the area, but most are restored and commercialized.  This one is considered "preserved," not restored - they haven't recreated the house or estate to look as it did hundreds of years ago.  We thought that sounded a lot more up our alley than watching presentations by actors dressed in blacksmith outfits and what have you.

It was beautiful!

Right on the Ashley River.

We did a little nature walk around the grounds before the house tour.

The house was built around 1740, and owned by the Drayton family until the 1970s, when they sold it to the National Trust.  The Draytons hadn't lived there since before 1900, though, so the house fell into disrepair.

It was still pretty impressive, though, and interesting to see it in its natural state rather than all made up in a fake fancy manner.

We drove back to Charleston and ended up happening upon the Hominy Grill, which a bunch of people had recommended to me but was too far from our hotel to walk.  It was fate!

I got the huevos rancheros.

Ben ordered cornbread, a biscuit, and fried green tomatoes.  To be fair, he did feel gross afterward.

We also got dessert because we are grownups and can do whatever we want.

Brownie hot fudge sundae:

Guinness chocolate cake.

Then we walked around a little bit to work off the sick full feeling and hung out in the hotel watching Christmas movies until it was time to eat again.  For our last meal we went to Slightly North of Broad, which we chose in part because they had medium plates you could order in lieu of yet another giant entree.

My spinach salad had too many candied pecans!  I think my stomach was reaching capacity.

Ben got a salad with a candied pear on top:

And here is where we went off the deep end entirely because I ordered quail and Ben got RAW BEEF.

I ordered creme brulee for dinner, which was awesome.

And Ben got banana cream pie, which (surprise!) was also awesome.

Sunday morning we drove home and then for dinner on Sunday night we had lettuce salad with broccoli, green beans, and chickpeas.  It's Tuesday now and I still feel like I have not really recovered from all that food.  Vacation is hard on the system!  But fun.

Chickpea Shawarma

This is the second thing I have made from Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day and it was super awesome.

The chickpeas are smothered in a curry/middle eastern yogurt sauce and baked, then served in a pita (or, in this case, Harris Teeter's white flatbreads, which we are obsessed with at our house) with lettuce, tomato, and tahini sauce.

I reheated some of the Greek Lemon Rice soup to go with, and the soup had become something freakishly similar to chicken noodle flavored from sitting in the fridge.  It was kind of exciting!

Greek Lemon Rice Soup

OK, I got another cookbook.  I had to, because it's Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romero, author of Viva Vegan and co-author of Veganomicon.  I've been looking forward to it for ages!  It arrived a couple weeks ago and it is huge - totally overwhelming.  I've made a few things so far, though, and they have all been great, including this soup.

It's a lemony broth with carrots, orzo, arborio rice, and pureed white beans to thicken it and add some protein.  I also added a couple handfuls of chopped spinach because I had some in the fridge to use up.  I never think I'm a soup person but then I almost always really like it when I make it from scratch, and this one will be good to have in the repertoire.

BBQ Collard Rolls

One of the last entrees I hadn't made from Veganomicon were these collard rolls.  I'd never really read the recipe but the idea seemed hard so I avoided it.  It was easy, though!  Especially because I used KC Masterpiece in lieu of making my own BBQ sauce.  I just had to boil the collard leaves, make the filling (mushrooms/black eyed peas/chopped collards/sauce), and roll the suckers up.

They were great and looked professional even though I didn't do a very good job of rolling!

Indian Supplies

My mom is awesome and also got me The Indian Slow Cooker for my birthday.  It's not a vegetarian cookbook per se, but most of the recipes are naturally vegan, which makes sense because the author has been vegan for most of her adulthood.  She has a second book called Vegan Indian Cooking, which I do not have.  (Yet.)

Last week I made the Punjabi kidney beans from this book because it was the only one for which I had all the ingredients.  My one complaint is that the recipes make a huge amount of food, and there are only two of us in the McClure household - but mainly I am making these things to eat for breakfast throughout the week, so if I get five breakfasts out of one recipe and have to throw some food out on Friday night, I still figure I am coming out ahead.  Also, the kidney beans are awesome and the recipe is online.  You should make them.  The cinnamon is key.

Today I drove the million (20?) miles to the Around the World Market, which is the best Indian market in the Raleigh area.  I got SO MUCH STUFF.  I made a list of all the sorts of beans I was supposed to buy, but then I got there and found I had not included enough detail on the list, so decided to play it safe and if they had versions of the same bean that were split, whole, etc., I went ahead and got them all.  I figure we will eat them eventually.  Plus they were only $3 each (or less!).  And now we are all set for at least a couple of months if there is an apocalypse.

I also replenished my stock of tamarind concentrate and got a huge bag of cinnamon sticks for $1.25, some paneer (not vegan!), and spices for Chana Masala.  And also some pad thai noodles, which for some reason they sell at very affordable prices at the Indian market.

I am SET.  Lots of crockpot Indian stuff coming our way this winter.

Apple Tempeh Triangle Dippers

My mom got me Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day for my birthday!  Yay!  I have had it on the Amazon Wish List for ages (and even moved it into my cart a couple of times) but could never pull the trigger.  There are some pretty awesome sandwich recipes in the book that I think will keep me occupied for a long time.

The first thing I tried, though, is not really a sandwich - Apple Tempeh Triangles with a pomegranate dipping sauce.  These look very fancy but using storebought puff pastry makes them super simple to put together.  The filling is just crumbled smoky tempeh, apples, pomegranate seeds, and cinnamon, and the sauce took 5 minutes to put together on the stovetop.

They were good at room temperature for lunch the next day, too!

Yamazushi

A few weeks ago I read this glowing review in the Raleigh News & Observer of Yamazushi Restaurant in Durham, specifically their 8 course tasting menu which can be made vegetarian, vegan, or even macrobiotic.  !!  Coincidentally, my birthday was coming up so I told Ben that's what I wanted to do.  I called and made a reservation and they asked me all sorts of questions about what we eat and took a credit card number to hold the spot.  I was pretty excited about all of this.  We went on Friday night.

I ordered a glass of wine and Ben ordered tea, which came in this fancy little pot.

The brought us an amuse bouche to start of daikon radish and house made tofu with a sweet miso sauce.  Excellent start to the meal.

The first course was seaweed salad, which had three kinds of seaweed and a vinegary sesame dressing.  I don't think I've ever had seaweed salad but I get the feeling this one was probably better than most.

Next up: stacked burdock matchsticks with edamame puree.  This was outstanding.  Note: I still do not know what burdock is.  

This was our favorite of the night - eggplant dengaku, which is a sweet sauce made of sake & miso.  The eggplant was so soft and velvety.  Perfect.

The fried course was thinly sliced tempura vegetables with fried seaweed and Japanese mint.

Next up: she called this a tofu, but then explained it is really made from pureed sesame seeds, thickened with arrowroot.  It was a custardy texture, with a nice deep smoky sesame flavor. 

The soup course was served in a little teapot, and she instructed that we were to pour the soup into the teacup and drink it slowly, and then when the liquid was gone, eat the cabbage, spinach, and mushrooms remaining in the pot.

The final savory dish was the rice course, a brown rice with some sort of thing mixed in that seemed maybe like cashews?  This is a very informative review, I know.  It was really great, though.  Some pickled vegetables were served on the side.

Dessert was an extremely tart lemon sorbet, served in a hollowed out lemon.  

We were there for three hours, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.  The restaurant is very small and quiet, and the service is impeccable - very polite and helpful as they explained each course in detail and answered our questions.  It's great to be able to try so many different things without feeling stuffed to the brim by the end of the meal - I think the spacing out of the courses helped with this, but the food itself was so focused on flavor rather than portion size, too.  We were laughing during the meal comparing it with your classic American steakhouse which would just serve you a huge piece of meat and potato and call that gourmet.  This was truly an awesome experience!  Happy birthday to me!

Vegan Food Out on the Town

I have been making mostly old recipes the last week (tonight was veggies and dumplings, which was even better than I remembered), but over the weekend we ate some good vegan food out and about that I thought I would share.

Neomonde has been in Raleigh for ages.  It's a Lebanese place down near NC State (i.e., far from my house) but we used to drive down there pretty often to get lunch and buy pita and other Middle Eastern items in the little grocery adjoining the restaurant.  Then last year, one opened about 2 miles away! I was VERY excited.  Now it's super convenient and I stop by sometimes after work to bring home Neomonde platters (hummus, baba ghanoush, pita, stuffed grape leaves, and tabbouleh) for dinner.  We went there Friday night before going out to the movies.

The baba ghanoush in particular is amazing, with a really deep smoky flavor.  Plus they gave me extra grape leaves for free.  Huzzah!

Then on Saturday we went to the Cooke Street Carnival, which was sort of underwhelming overall, but the main point of going for me was to sample The Fiction Kitchen's vegan barbecue.  They have been holding vegan brunches and serving their BBQ at events for the last few years but now they are about to open a restaurant. !!  This is completely amazing news, as Raleigh has precisely zero vegetarian restaurants, except for the odd Indian place or something like that.

We both got the BBQ sandwich, which was served with an apple cilantro cabbage slaw.  It was GOOD.  This picture is not good, but I am posting it anyway.  You can see some hipsters in the background.

I plan on spending a lot of time (and money) at Fiction Kitchen in the next few months so STAY TUNED.

Atomic Tofu Pecan Loaf

I started making vegan dinners over two years ago and pretty often I still choose a recipe specifically because it sounds kind of hilarious.  I have no idea why this tofu pecan loaf (from Vegan Slow Cooker) is called atomic.  It seems like that should mean spicy, but it's not spicy at all!  It's another vegetarian meat-style loaf, this time made primarily from a picture of TVP, tofu, pecans, and oat bran.  I make another one from Vegan Diner sometimes but it's more complicated - this took no time to put together and cooked all day in the crockpot.  Look how realistic it is!

I've always topped meat loaf with ketchup, but this one is a half & half mixture of ketchup and A-1 steak sauce, which I totally recommend.  It adds some zest!  Maybe that's the atomic part.

Persian Eggplant Stew with Edamame Dill Pilaf

The weather people said all week that it was finally going to get coldish today, so although I found them hard to believe, I put this warm & hearty fall-like menu on the schedule.  Amazingly, they were right!  It was 83 yesterday and 53 today.  FINALLY.

This stew and pilaf are both from World Vegan Feast, a cookbook I tend to avoid because so many of the recipes seem like they'll take forever.  The pilaf was super quick to put together, once I cooked the rice, but the stew did sort of take forever.  It wasn't active time, but it had to simmer for 45 minutes and then bake for another 45, which means it is strictly a weekend recipe.  It was really good, though - chickpeas and tomatoes simmered with quartered limes (which made me feel fancy somehow) and then poured over roasted eggplant for baking.

The pairing seemed weird in my head - limey tomato and chickpeas + strongly dill-flavored rice - but it worked very well.  I do like everything I've made from World Vegan Feast and I know I need to give it a closer eye for recipes that can be made during the week.

Crockpot Chickpea Vegetable Stew

This started off as Spring Minestrone from Vegan Slow Cooker, but I ended up changing so many things I will call it something else and tell you what's in it so you can make it yourself!  And you should, because it's delicious.

1/2 a diced onion
3 cloves garlic
1-inch piece lemon peel
1 16 oz can diced fire-roasted tomatoes
3 cups cooked chickpeas (or 2 cans rinsed & drained)
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 yellow squash, diced
1 bunch kale, cut into ribbons or bite sized pieces
5 cups water
1 Tbsp dried oregano
salt & pepper to taste

Saute the onion and garlic in a little olive oil until soft.  Add to the crockpot, along with the lemon peel, tomatoes, chickpeas, carrots, and squash.  Add the oregano, about a tsp of salt and 1/2 tsp of pepper and the water.  (I did all this stuff the night before and stuck the whole thing in the fridge overnight to avoid having to deal with it in the morning.) Cook on low all day.

About a half hour before serving, add the kale and more salt & pepper if you want.

The end!

BLT Burgers

It's been a long time since I've pulled out The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet, so I decided to try a new one to eat with the rest of our farmer's market corn from the weekend.  I chose the BLT Burgers, which are made primarily with equal parts all purpose flour, vital wheat gluten, and (fake) bacon bits, and some diced tomato mixed into the dough.  She said the recipe makes "four huge burgers," but history has taught me she means business when she says "huge," so I split it into six.  She also says to stuff the avocado into the patties themselves, but since I was planning on freezing half of them I just served the avocado on top.

These were good!  Look at the little bacon bits!