I didn’t set out to veganize Cook’s Illustrated’s ‘Sichuan Stir-Fried Pork in Garlic Sauce’ — it just sort of happened. It’s not that I have anything against vegans, and if you are vegan and ever come to our house for dinner I would enjoy the challenge of preparing a strictly plant-based meal. Personally though, I’ve never found the arguments behind veganism convincing—so absent a guest with a vegan diet at the table, I don’t bother limiting my ingredient list based on any prescribed set of rules. Sometimes, though, such limits arise outside of my meal plan.

Temporarily out of stock

The first ingredient in the Cook’s recipe is chicken broth and although I’m sure it’s routinely passed off as such by unscrupulous restaurateurs chicken broth is definitely not vegan. I’ve got nothing against it at all—as long as it’s homemade. A few years ago I realized that by saving the bones from every piece of chicken we eat in a bag in the freezer I could make stock that was pretty good and very cheap. When enough bones and sundry chicken parts have accumulated, I cover the lot with water in the crock pot, and in eight short hours it’s ready for action. Naturally, that discovery morphed into the idea that it was immoral to ever buy store-bought stock again. I’m not without my food restrictions—they just don’t have to do with avoiding eating or enslaving animals. And so it was that while we were doing the week’s shopping I refused to buy broth-in-a-box, even though I knew the supply of carefully frozen cubes of stock in the freezer was dwindling. As it turns out I cut it too close, and Martha used up the last of our home-made stock making a delicious vegetable soup a couple of days prior. At some point in the week I was aware of the issue and intended to fire up the slow cooker at the right time to replenish the stock supply, but as of the morning I had forgotten and by the time I got home to make dinner it was already too late. So I turned to the poor man’s vegan-friendly chicken stock: good old H₂O.

Also called for in the recipe was fish sauce, which is usually made with ground up anchovies or other tiny fish. I don’t particularly like fish sauce, and I especially don’t like the way it tends to sit in the fridge unused for many months, taking up valuable shelf real-estate. And it isn’t free either. So I had consciously planned to skip the fish sauce all along, for my own special anti-fish sauce reasons.

The meaning of putrid

With water substituted for chicken broth and no fish sauce swimming in that water, my stir-fry sauce was vegan. But there remained the more obvious question of the pork. Even among those who eat meat, pork is the subject of special dietary restrictions, being notably forbidden to Jews and Muslims who observe their faiths’ dietary laws. This can be mystifying to those of us with no such restrictions, since pork is quite possibly the most delicious of all the meats, especially in its bacon and jamón forms. I say all this to make it clear that I am normally a pork enthusiast and would go to great lengths to incorporate this glorious meat into my cooking, and would never intentionally omit it.

Excited as I was for an opportunity to consume that forbidden beast, any excitement rapidly faded as I pulled the cellophane-wrapped package of pork—purchased at the co-op only days before—and noticed strong bands of discoloration running down the darkened meat. Here’s a pro-tip: if you notice the color of your pork is way off, just throw it out. Do it right now. Because I’m an idiot, I decided to give the pork a good smell, just to make sure. The word putrid gets thrown about pretty casually these days, but I believe it can really only be properly understood as referring to the special stench of rotting meat. Martha, for her part, declined a whiff.

As I was walking the meat down the stairs and directly out to the dumpster behind our building, since a stink like that would pretty quickly sneak out of our tiny trash can and make our tiny apartment unlivable, I thought wistfully of the farmers market season, when food can be bought that’s fresh enough to sit in the refrigerator for a few days without rotting. Only a couple of months to go!

Having disposed of the pork, the last obstacle between this recipe and full-fledged veganism was gone. I was saved by a half head of napa cabbage (the universally acknowledged pig of the vegetable kingdom) that was sitting in the crisper drawer in the wake of the aforementioned vegetable soup. It turned out well, and while I can’t say no animals were harmed in the making of this stir-fry, it is comforting to know that no animals had to be.

Vegan mushroom and cabbage stir-fry with garlic sauce

Sauce

• 1/2 c water
• 2 T sugar
• 2 T soy sauce
• 2 t balsamic vinegar
• 2 t sherry vinegar
• 1 T toasted sesame oil
• 1 T sherry
• 2 t ketchup
• 2 t cornstarch

Stir-Fry

• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 5 scallions, white parts minced, green parts sliced thin
• 2 T sriracha
• 4 T vegetable oil
• 6 oz mushrooms (I used white button mushrooms; shiitakes would be better)
• 4 celery ribs, cut on a bias into 1/4 inch slices
• 1/2 small head napa cabbage, sliced thin.

Whisk together sauce ingredients; set aside.

Combine garlic, scallions, and sriracha in a small bowl; set aside.

Heat 1 T oil in 12″ non-stick skillet until almost smoking. Add celery and mushrooms and cook until softened and starting to singe on the edges. Transfer cooked vegetables to large bowl.

Heat another 1 T oil in the skillet until almost smoking. Add cabbage and cook until wilted and browned in places. Add to bowl with vegetables.

Heat remaining 2 T of oil in the skillet over medium-low heat. Add garlic-scallion mixture and cook until fragrant — about 30 seconds — stirring frequently. Whisk sauce to recombine and add to skillet. Bring to a boil to thicken and add vegetables. Stir to combine. Serve hot with rice.

There are plenty of fast foods that you can make better at home: this burger will beat anything that ever crawled out from under any golden arches, or, if Taco Bell is your thing, you can easily beat the experience at home by cooking up a bowl of oatmeal and throwing it in a tortilla. But there are some foods that are better never attempted at home; foods that benefit from economies of scale such that cooking them at home makes no sense.

Kushari is one of those foods. In Cairo, you don’t have to walk far to find a kushari stand, but the complexity of the operation — and these places only serve the one dish — is a clue to its unsuitability for adaptation at home. After indicating just how much kushari you’re interested in eating you can watch your bowl head down the line where it is filled from several pots, one man to a pot: rice, noodles, lentils, chickpeas, fried onions and tomato sauce.

Yes, this is really a dish with both rice and pasta, lentils and chickpeas. It’s a starch-lover’s dream, packed with affordable calories — which partially explains its popularity in Egypt. Preparing these ingredients to all be ready simultaneously is something the many employees of the kushari joint have down to a science. Doing it at home, unless you have a ready brigade of helpers and extra stove space, is a challenge. And for the humble result , you are better off just hitting up the local kushari place.

Unfortunately, outside of Egypt such restaurants are rare. (I did once locate kushari in Minneapolis, a special at the Lyndale Grill and Grocery.) So for those of you with a craving that can’t be satisfied and some patience, here’s what I did: my stove has four burners; I used three of them (the fourth being taken up by a pot of old frying oil that I am too lazy to clean). On one, I started a pot of rice. At 30 minutes, this is one of the longest cooking items. In a pan on another burner, I started caramelizing some onions. In a large pot on the third burner, I brought water and lentils to a boil.

After 20 minutes, the lentils were toothsome and ready to come out. But don’t drain them! You need that hot lentil water! I used a mesh strainer to fish out as many lentils as possible from the water and placed them in a covered bowl to stay warm. After bringing the water back to a boil, I added in broken vermicelli.

In the meantime, the onions had become suitably browned. Transferring them to a small bowl, I quickly wiped out the skillet and began heating olive oil, garlic and red pepper flakes until they were fragrant. To this, I added a can of tomato puree (actually a can of pureed diced tomatoes, but buying them pre-pureed would have been easier) and let the tomato sauce simmer. Soon, the vermicelli was within a minute of being done so I added a can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed, to the cooking pasta in order to warm them. If you wanted to make this dish more complicated, you could start with dried chickpeas.

The assembly of kushari proceeds in layers: a base of rice, topped with pasta and chickpeas, topped with lentils, garnished with fried onions and finally covered in tomato sauce. Whenever I ate this in Egypt it was served with a thin, vinegary hot sauce which I simulated at home by blending a little sriracha into a lot of rice vinegar.

Although ostensibly a day devoted to giving thanks, Thanksgiving for many descends into gluttony — or at the very least eating a bit too much food that is a bit too rich. Whatever effect this might have on one’s soul, it definitely takes a toll on the body, as the pending post-thanksgiving naps will attest. The days after Thanksgiving give no respite, either: these are days devoted to the consumption of leftovers, constructing, eating and immediately regretting ever-more ridiculous “Thanksgiving sandwiches”. I’m not saying I don’t like Thanksgiving — quite the opposite, I assure you — just that it has a way of making one’s body feel pushed to the limit.

Anticipating this food binge in the days before the big day, I’m filled with a puritanical need to purge. For about three days before Thanksgiving I adopt an almost-vegan diet, avoiding meat, heavy fats and anything that feels like it will linger past its welcome in my gut. Simple meals of grains and vegetables — in small portions — is what I crave before a meal that is complicated, rich and excessively-portioned.

If you too are both excited for and slightly dreading Thanksgiving indulgence, or if in the aftermath of the holiday you’re ready to give up on the damned leftovers, make a meal of this dal and flatbread, inspired by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Flatbreads & Flavors.

Dal

• ½ medium onion, sliced thin
• 2 tsp vegetable oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1 cup red lentils
• 4 cups water
• 1 tsp salt
• ¼ tsp black pepper, ground
• ¼ tsp ground cumin
• Dash ground turmeric
• Cinnamon stick, a couple of inches long
• ½ cup cilantro

Fry onion in vegetable oil in 4 qt saucepan over medium-high heat until edges start to brown. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add lentils and water and stir to combine. Add salt, spices and cinnamon stick. Bring to a boil, then simmer over low heat, covered, for 20 to 25 minutes, until porridge-like. Off heat, stir in cilantro and adjust seasoning. Serve warm.

Puri

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• ¼ tsp black pepper, ground
• ¼ tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 cup yogurt
• ½ cup water

Pulse flours, spices and salt together in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the metal blade to evenly distribute. Add yogurt and water and process until dough has formed a cohesive, smooth ball — about two minutes in my processor. Place dough in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rest about 1 hour.

Divide the dough into 3 oz balls — you should have 14. Allow the balls to rest 20-30 minutes. After the dough balls have rested, begin rolling them out: they should be rolled as thin as possible, as if for tortillas.

Heat a dry large skillet over medium high heat. Cook one flatbread at a time, flipping after bubbles appear all over the surface of the bread. The bread should be dark brown, almost charred in spots. Store cooked breads in a towel to keep warm while you prepare the rest of the breads.

Note: Purists will note this is not actually puri, which should be fried in oil. You might recall the whole point of this meal was to avoid fats like that — if it makes you happier think of these as puri-inspired flatbreads. Also, if you can get it, substitute 3 cups Indian atta flour for the flour in the recipe.

Serve the dal and puri together, using torn off bits of bread to scoop up the lentils.

Ever since I noticed it opening in the old My-T-Fine (great name for a tea shop, why did it close?) on my way to work, I have wanted to try Cafe Agri. I think I was mostly drawn in by their logo and their slogan “from field to fork”. At the time I was under the sway of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (I still am, but it was fresh) and excited by the idea of another restaurant based on local and seasonal food close to my home. 

Reviewing the menu that was posted a couple of weeks later gave me pause. The food did appear to be local, but what was all this tempeh nonsense? As it turns out, Agri focuses not only on local and sustainable food, but also on vegetarians and vegans. Fair enough, but not the kind of place that calls my name. Still, I was intrigued and, after a few months, decided it was time to give it a try.

On entering the place, we couldn’t help but be impressed by the decor, particularly the many interesting light fixtures. Martha could probably say more about this but she’s not here so hah.  Anyway, Agri gets high marks for atmosphere.

They also have a very good selection of interesting wine and beer, mostly organic. You might miss this while trying to decipher their inexplicably centered drink menu, but there really are a lot of good, reasonably-priced choices. We both went beer.

And then there was the menu itself. Reviewing the six entrees, I began to despair. There was plenty offered to make the vegetarian, vegan or celiac sufferer happy: very limited meat (one entree with trout), tempeh and tofu aplenty, and as little gluten as possible. But, since I am none of those things, I wondered what exactly I wanted to order and pay $16 for. Butternut squash ravioli? Now where have I seen that before? Tempeh terrine? With pork or goose liver? Penne Primavera? In inverno? In the end we decided to just have a couple of appetizers and head for greener (well, less green) pastures. So keep in mind that this is in no way a fair review.

We ordered two dishes: the yam crisps with fresh guacamole, described as “baked—not fried!” which I assume was meant to be a recommendation rather than an apology, and the falafel (also baked) with cucumber salad and yogurt dill sauce.

The yam crisps themselves were good. Besides having beautifully curled edges, they were, in fact, crisp with a pleasant, not overwhelming sweetness. The guacamole, on the other hand, could not be described as good. It was severely underseasoned, resembling those awful supermarket guacamoles made with sour cream or mayonnaise. I suspect, had the lighting been bighter, its color would have been closer to brown than green, but I have no way of proving this. I also wondered from which farm in Minnesota they had obtained the fresh avocados, especially in winter. 

As for the falafel, I should never have expected to like it in the first place since it was billed as “Baked Falafel” and I don’t like baked falafel. This certainly was baked falafel, in all its sandy-textured mediocrity. It was topped by a tasteless tomato slice (did I mention it’s winter?) and yogurt sauce, which deserves neither praise nor blame. The cucumber salad was really a quick pickle of thick-cut, seeded cucumber slices and onion. Serving pickles with falafel makes good sense since pickles are very popular in the Middle East, but this was a sweet pickle rather than a sour-hot pickle as you might expect with Middle Eastern cuisine. Inauthenticity is of course not a fault per se, but I didn’t think the sweet pickles really did anything for the falafel. In any case I would have preferred fresh cucumber.

And that was all we tried. Hardly enough to base a review upon, even in these troubled economic times. But I think our reaction to the menu points to a problem with Agri and other restaurants like it. Local, organic and sustainable food are all good things. We really need more restaurants to make such food a priority; indeed, it should be the default. For that future to happen, however, food that is local, organic and sustainable has to appeal to the public: it should be relatively inexpensive (which should happen anyway because of reduced fertilizer, equipment, and transportation costs) but more importantly it should be delicious. Instead of seeing these things when he goes to a restaurant like Agri, average, closed-minded John Q. Public just has his presuppositions about this kind of food confirmed: bean curd compressed to various textures and shapes prepared in thin sauces by ascetic health nuts. Not for me. Organic and sustainable does not have to mean soybeans, and maybe it shouldn’t at all. Of course, Agri might not even want these customers. They may have intended to primarily serve vegans and vegetarians (god knows they could use a few more places) and not to be the ambassador of local/organic/seasonable/sustainable that I had made them in my mind. If Agri’s content to preach to the choir, that’s fine, but I won’t be in the pews.