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!