Recipes for March 4, 2009

I've had a few people complement us on the meal yesterday, which is always good to hear. Mostly it's: "What's the recipe for the gnocchi?!!"

Well, yesterday's meal was backed by some excellent recipes from this awesome vegan cooking blog I just found, veganyumyum.com, and a goodly dose of the usual on-the-fly Yam! inspiration.

So, the meal:

• Potato Gnocchi with Thyme Vinaigrette and Lemon Cashew Cream. We strayed from the gnocchi making instructions on this recipe, making things a bit more "rustic". We boiled the potatoes, instead of baking them, left the skins on, mashed them (and used a hand-blender) instead of using a ricer, and added olive oil, salt, and water to the potatoes. The aim was to make a smooth, soft dough that could be rolled out into long "snakes". We then chopped them into pinky-width sized pieces and put them directly into salted boiling water for 2 minutes. No rolling them down a gnocchi board to get those nice ridges, or anything like that. For the potatoes we used Yukon gold.
  
  We stuck closely to the recipes for the vinaigrette and lemon cashew cream sauces. Not really local. But delicious.
  
• Roasted squash. The old standby. Slice squash into half-pinky width pieces, place on pan, slather in oil, a little salt, bake at 500F until golden, flip once or twice while they're baking.
• Lentil salad. This Kira and I totally made up. We imagined some beautiful Italian style salad, with red and yellow peppers, lots of parsley, and vinegar. Alas, that's for summer. Instead we made up our own, not even close to Italian style salad. I'm not sure I can even tell you how we did it exactly; I'll need Kira's help. Basically, we boiled green lentils in veggie stock until they were edible but firm, cooled them down. Added lots of chopped parsley. Separately we sauteed minced garlic (a LOT of it), and added it to it crumbled firm tofu. Cooked this in plenty of sesame oil, adding a variety of spices: salt, pepper, cumin, mustard seed, steak seasoning(! I know!), and other things which only Kira can tell you.
  
• Pear tartlets. We based the pastry on this intriguing recipe from Vegan Yum Yum, because it made for quick assembly through bypassing the process of rolling out the pastry, but instead just cramming it against the edges of the cupcake tins. My opinion: the pastry was a bit tough, and maybe because of this. Yam!ers, thoughts?
  
  We didn't cover the tarts as in the recipe above, but just left them open.
  
  The filling was diced pears, dried currents, blueberries, maple syrup, sugar, and some flour. Maybe some cinnamon. We baked them at 350 F for about 25 minutes, IIRC.
• Peppermint Tea. Boiling water + dried peppermint.