Holy cow, what a month. And here we are at the end and the Is My Blog Burning – Vegan thingy is due, tonight.
It wasn’t too long ago that Sam called me out on this one. She specifically nailed Meathenge, which makes sense actually. I’ve ditched ALL but the Grilling IMBB years ago, just don’t have the time. I know everyone is praising the lovely Sam, “oh isn’t she JUST THE BEST???” Grrrr.
When she first posted the theme, I wasn’t phased. Some of the best meals I’ve been served have been at least vegetarian, maybe vegan. I don’t remember cause it was 15 years ago. In any case, what made me crazy was that I’ve never intentionally made a vegetarian or vegan meal. And what put me in to a mood swing last week was that I didn’t have a slammin’ vegan recipe or 3 to make people swoon. Dr. Biggles was in a rut without a jeep or shovel. What to do?

Well, if you’re an intelligent person you ask someone who knows. So, I axed E, the co-chef at The Five Pints blog. She is wily in the ways of vegetables. What works for stock, stews and simmers. She and I came out with a great vegetable stock and vegan stew situation that sat well with my psyche. It’s a basic roasted stock and worked out GREAT. See?

Here’s what I gathered:
1 leek
1 medium onion
3 carrots
2 stalks of celery
2 handfulls of mushrooms
2 quarts o’ water
8 thingies of parsley
3 sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf
8 black peppercorns, whole
salt – you make the call on how much
I sliced all the veggies pretty thin, so I’d have max surface area for flavor. Tossed these in to a bowl with 5 tablespoonfuls of oil, install in to a 400 degree oven in a large roasting pan for 30 minutes. Toss the goodies a few times, keep them moving.
After they toasted and cute? Put in a stock pot and add most of the water, retain about a pint. Bring to a boil, LIGHT BOIL!
Heat up the roasting pan and use the remaining water to deglaze, empty in stock pot. Gently bring to boil and I mean a gentle boil where just a few bubbles are rising. Do this for 45 minutes and yer done. Take your collapsable veggie steamer and toss in, upside down.

See? Now when you pour out your stock? It’ll come out mostly clean and ready to go. I asked Mama to hold the thing in with a wooden spoon while I poured. You wanna know what the stock looked like? Yes?

Yup, that’s some badass veggie stock if I do say so myself. Did I taste it? Nope, it looked fine and I really didn’t want to taste it, shudder.
That was a week ago. I started mulling over the idea of a Vegan Stew and I was losing touch with it, wasn’t feeling the love. I needed to find something that sparked my interest. Something I wanted to do and was inspired to do. It wasn’t until maybe 4 days ago that I started looking in earnest and ran accross a load of Vegan Chili Recipes! That’s it! How could I miss? That’s an excellent idea, a rich and satisfying Vegan Chili & Cornbread meal. Okay, I was inspired and ready to go.
As most of you home cooks/chefs know, you can generally look at a recipe and see whether it’s worth a pinch of moon poo or not. I found 3 recipes I liked for the chili and combined their ingredients to this:

2 medium onions – white
Tons of fresh smooshed garlic
3 tablespoonfulls of chile powder
2 teaspoonfulls ground cumin
1 teaspoonfull dried oregano
2 cups fresh veggie stock
28 ounces of maters
1 good beer
2 teaspoonfulls of sugar
1 teaspoonfull of salt
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoonfull cornmeal
1 28 ounce can of beanses
1 log fake soy product sausage thing
2 chipotle chile peppers in adobo (from a can) (Hey Barrett, I’m eating CROW !!!)
Get nice large heavy enamel coated dutch oven and heat it up, using a sloosh of oil to coat the bottom. Open up your “sausage” and break in to pieces and let it brown in the oil. This is really really important, caramelization is flavor and we need all we can get.

Add the onions and bring to translucency. Then add garlic, chile powder, cumin, oregano and chipotle chile pepper. Sizzle the goodies around for maybe 10 minutes.
Add the Veggie Stock.
Add tomatoes, beer, sugar, salt and bay leaf.
Bring this to a decent but careful boil. Don’t jack the heat too hard. When it’s hot and going, sprinkle the cornmeal over and stir in. Set lid to cover slightly and simmer for about and hour and a half.
I need to backtrack a bit, a little thought that needs to be laid down. Making an American simmered Chili takes time, love and most of all? A Chili Spoon, no kidding. If you’re going to be any success at all, you must have beyond anything else, a Chili Spoon. See how good this looks?

The spoon shown here is my father’s Chili Spoon and dates back way over 40 years. When using this spoon? I can’t lose, it’s as though I’ve paid the gods off, I am in full control and I own this chili’s soul.
Alright, we’ve backtracked and got chili on the stove smelling GREAT. Now what goes with homemade chili? That’s right, cornbread! Here’s how I laid it down.
2 cupfulls cornmeal
1 cupfull of AP flower (heh, wouldn’t that be pretty?)
2 teaspoonfulls baking powder (always sift leavening agents)
1/3 cupfull canola oil
2 tablespoonsfull maple syrup
2 cupfulls of soy milk
2 teaspoonfulls apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoonfull salt
8 sprigs of fresh thyme – leave branches out, foo
Git that oven of yours up to Treefiddy (350F), rack at center.
Preheat cast iron pan and spray with vegan love.
Whisk soyamilk, vinegar, oil and maple syrup together until froffy.
Add to dry and mix well, carefully. Pour in to your preheated pan and bake for maybe 30 minutes or until it’s done.

And here you go, a wonderful American Classic, Chili with cornbread!
How did it taste? The chile tasted like bitter gasoline and is inedible. I’ll yank the fake sausage (really horrible whether your vegan or not) and replace it with some meat this coming weekend. Classic American Chili clearly isn’t a vegan product and should be avoided. There are so many other dishes to make that will make you smile. And it isn’t that I don’t understand what’s going on, the problem was that I believe these online forums and recipes listed by people who clearly have no idea what good chili tastes like. I believe if I fed my meal to someone who didn’t know? It would have tasted fine, even almost good. But I know what good chili tastes like, and sister? Brother? This isn’t it.
The cornbread? It was fine and I have NO problem with it. It was excellent schmeared with butter and honey. Perfectly fine!
So, in a nutshell? I made world class vegetable broth, baked a fine vegan cornbread and learned that some things simply cannot be made properly with out huge amounts of animal fat. And as near as I can tell, celebrate your vegan/veggie ness. Don’t try to make MEAT meals with soy products, it’s pathetic and wrong. You’re better than that, move along.
Biggles
Note:
I feel pretty good about the images in this posting. One might begin to think, “Holy moly! Biggles must have this nice large kitchen and expensive digital strobe setup to get images like those, surely”
Do you really want to see how that last image looked from 6 feet away?

There’s my 10 year old boy, standing in the kitchen sink, holding a 40 year old 250 watt flood light. See the covered wagon down there on the portable dishwasher? Here’s my studio in all its glory. So don’t EVEN give tell me you can’t get the lighting right or you have a small area to work with. It’s all about your strategy, make it work.
Tagged with: IMBB # 19 + Vegan