CSA Round Up: Week 1

Summers in Detroit are great for so many reasons, but one of my favorites is the City Commons CSA. I was a member in 2014, and couldn't wait to renew this year. I've belonged to a few CSAs over the years (as mentioned here), but City Commons has been my favorite. It's very reasonably priced, hyper-local (all grown in Detroit), and most importantly, has a super convenient bi-weekly half share pick-up. I've struggled in past years to use all the produce (especially living by myself, in a location where I can have vegan pizza, Indian food, and sandwiches/curly fries all delivered to my door), but vowed this year will be different. No waste allowed!

In an effort to keep myself honest, I'm going to try to post the bi-weekly haul and how I used it. Without further ado, here's week 1:

There's lettuce, chard, kale, bok choy, oregano, dill, garlic scapes, and strawberries. Yes, strawberries!!! Another great thing about City Commons is that they post what will (likely) be in the baskets on Tuesday and I pick up on Saturday, so I had time to game plan. First up was bok choy, used in Ginger Bok Choy & Soba from Appetite for Reduction:

This was pretty good, though next time I'd use half as many noodles. The recipe notes suggested adding tofu, which I mistakenly read as adding the Hoisin-Mustard Tofu. After making it, I realized the suggestion was to dry fry the tofu like the first step in that recipe. Since it was already made, I decided to use up the lettuce to prepare the tofu as lettuce wraps (the original recipe). I should note that the decision to make wraps occurred when I got home from the Windsor-Detroit fireworks (and related drinking), so the "wraps" very quickly devolved into "tofu on lettuce". I'm including this picture because it pretty aptly describes my attempt at drunk food prep:

And a close up:

These were good, but weirdly reminded me of egg salad. I think it's just that for a decade, any time I've had cold tofu cubes in mustard sauce, it's been vegan egg salad. It was good though, and probably would have been better as a lettuce-wrapped appetizer.

Next up, strawberries, dill and oregano. I lifted my 18-month cookbook buying moratorium to buy Salad Samurai by Terry Hope Romero specifically in anticipation of the CSA. The very first salad recipe in the book is for Spring Herb Salad with Maple Orange Tempeh Nibbles. The recipe had a number of steps (roasting pecans and cooking tempeh), and I assembled it over a few days, but it was so delicious and worth every minute of effort. I wish I had staged this better than in a Pyrex container, because this salad deserves to be on a silver platter sitting on a bed of diamonds:

After my early cooking marathon, I went to Craft-A-Way Camp (another favorite summer tradition) and lost my cooking momentum. At the last minute (literally, I woke up, cooked, then picked up my new basket), I used the garlic scapes, chard and kale. I just steamed the greens with the chopped scapes, and added some tofu dry-fried with a little soy sauce. And you know what? It was DELICIOUS. So amazing. Sometimes I forget how good plain food can taste. Even two weeks old, the greens were fantastic and the garlic scapes were also a great addition. They added a great texture and plenty of flavor. 

Whew! I made it through my first week!

Purple Carrot Review v2.0

A few weeks ago, I posted about The Purple Carrot, which is a vegan meal [ingredient] delivery service. According to their website, it's "All the raw, pre-measured ingredients and recipes you need to cook healthy, delicious vegan meals and snacks at home - just $59, delivered!" As I noted in my previous post, I was skeptical of the value of these ingredient delivery services, but I've found they do a good job of forcing me to eat healthier. This is the third time I've ordered from TPC, and each time I used a 50% off promo code. In that case, for $30, you get the ingredients to make two four-serving meals and a snack. On sale, I feel like it's slightly cheaper than going to the grocery store, plus it's pre-measured and shows up at my apartment.

My complaint the past two times I've ordered was that the recipes weren't well tested and the food didn't taste exceptionally good. I might be getting better at choosing (you select two meals out of four offerings), but I was much happier with the meals this time.

First up, Quinoa Power Bowl with Adzuki and Spinach:

This was quinoa, adzuki beans, roasted sweet potatoes, and spinach, with a dill cashew cream sauce, topped with almonds. The recipe is pretty self explanatory. As written, it made four servings at 726 calories each. I divided it up into eight servings instead, since I've been trying to eat smaller meals.

This is a solidly nutritious meal and it's amazingly delicious. I will definitely be making it again, though I'll add more spinach and sweet potatoes next time. But seriously, it's so delicious!!! 

Next up, Speedy Teriyaki Noodles:

This is another fairly  simple recipe, with brown rice noodles, carrots, celery, broccoli and edamame in a teriyaki sauce, garnished with green onions and sesame seeds. It came together pretty quickly, and again, I made the four servings into six.

This is good. It's not great and keeping with my normal complaint, the recipe should have been better tested because the carrots were undercooked by adding them at the end. But it's still fairly tasty and was quick and easy to make. 

I didn't take any pictures of the snack, Blueberry Chocolate Trail Mix Bark. It's exactly what it sounds like -- dried blueberries, peanuts and pretzels with melted chocolate chips. I made this into 12 breakfast servings and it's so delicious. Every morning, I consider eating a second piece because I just want more salty, sweet, crunchy, chewy chocolate. It's a recipe from Robin Robertson, so I wisely trusted that one. 

Here's the total haul: 12 breakfasts, eight lunches and six dinners for $29.50 and a few hours of cooking.

Oh, and an hour of cleaning up the kitchen. I normally attempt to clean-as-I-go, but I severely slacked this time. Ooops:

After three times, I stand by my opinion that The Purple Carrot is a great value when you can find a promo code and it's a good way to ensure you'll eat healthy food if you don't have a ton of time or energy (you still need SOME to cook everything, but you'll save the meal planning and grocery shopping step).

Cheesecake Dreams (aka Daiya review)

Cheesecake was always my favorite desert, even when I was a kid and the only "cheesecake" I'd ever had was Jello No-Bake with cherry pie filling on top. Fast-forward a few decades, and I consider myself something of a connoisseur enthusiastic-consumer of vegan cheesecake. Metro Detroit Whole Foods stores sometimes have slices from the Chicago Diner that are FANTASTIC. I buy one whenever I see it, but at $5 a pop, that gets pricey. 

I'd heard about the new Daiya cheesecakes and was excited to finally see them in the freezer case. The Detroit Whole Foods had both chocolate and New York Style on sale for $6.99 the last time I was there, so I figured I'd give it a try. The downside is that it has to thaw 4-6 hours, but I'm a genius glutton, so I bought a ready-to-eat Chicago Diner slice AND a frozen Daiya one.

The verdict? Delicious! It's not exactly an 'authentic' cheesecake (like the Chicago Diner version), but more like a tangy, thick mousse, which is also delicious. I attempted to exercise self-control in this picture, but ended up eating the rest straight out of the plastic container over 24 hours. I also want to try the NY Style, but I knew better than to have two of these in my apartment at the same time!

Sophie's Kitchen of Disappointment

I've mentioned before that I have an inexplicable affinity for mock seafood. I wasn't a huge seafood fan before, but maybe it seems like the last frontier of veganization? Sophie's Kitchen makes a wide variety of vegan seafood (shrimp, calamari, fish sticks) and for a while, I tried every variety I saw. Ultimately, I realized I didn't miss seafood and would rather eat my hippie food. But when I saw a variety of tuna at Whole Foods, I had to try it. One of my favorite things to eat pregan was Kraft mac & cheese with tuna and peas. Now that Earth Balance makes a vegan mac and cheese that tastes exactly like Kraft's (in my mind, at least), it was a no-brainer to attempt a vegan version. Behold the [theoretical] tower of processed perfection: 

I tried the Meatless Select vegetarian tuna a couple years ago and remember it being pretty passable in appearance. When I opened the Sophie's kind, it reminded me A LOT of cat food:

It tasted kind of weird, but I persisted and made the mac & cheese and peas, then mixed it all together. I set it down on the table (a great habit I picked up during 2014 MoFo!) and walked away to get a drink. When I turned around, my cat had jumped on the table and was vigorously attempting to bury my dinner, which is what she does with HER food. Action shot:

I've only tasted cat food once, when I mistook the gravy from cat food for gravy from the vegan shepherd's pie I was eating (don't ask). I can assure you, this did NOT taste like cat food. That said, it didn't taste particularly good, either. The tuna had a weird texture and made the dish too salty. I love that EB mac and cheese so much that I ate it anyway, but it would have been better without the $4 can of fake tuna. I portioned out some leftovers, which I will also eat, but only because I REALLY hate wasting food.

Sadly, the quest for vegan tuna will continue.

The Purple Carrot: lazy grocery shopping for lazy people

When those meal ingredient boxes first started popping up, I didn't think they made sense. I mean, if you're too busy/lazy to go to the grocery store, wouldn't it follow that you are too busy/lazy to cook? Then in a moment of weakness (seriously, I took a day off work and spent the entire thing shopping online), I checked out The Purple Carrot, a vegan version. You choose two of the four meals they're featuring, and they send you the ingredients to make four servings of each, plus a "snack". They were running a 50% off promotion, so all that was $30. I figured $30 for basically a week of groceries delivered to my door was too good to pass up. I ordered black bean enchiladas and the goddess bowl, plus peanut butter banana oat balls. I made all the stuff and while it was certainly convenient, I felt bad about all the packaging and didn't think the food tasted exceptionally good.

A few weeks went by and I decided to give it another try (with another 50% off promo). I ordered Sweet Potato Mushroom Tacos with Mango Salsa and Korean Bibimbap, plus the Cranberry Granola Bar snack. This time I took pictures:

It's very convenient how everything comes packaged together, but again, I feel bad about all the trash it generates. I reused most of the bags and kept the ice packs, but I have no use for the box or the insulation it comes with. Anyway, I spent a few hours last Saturday putting everything together:

The cooking was pretty simple, if time consuming. As you can see, I'm reusing some bags for the granola "bars", which are more like super-sticky clumps of granola. It might be user error, though the recipes don't seem to be tested very thoroughly. Case in point: the tacos below. The proportions of the different filings were way off. And it's hard to believe that something with that many ingredients could be bland, but it really didn't have much flavor.

Here's the bibimbap, which had LOTS of spicy flavor. I only put in half of the chili paste to avoid that. Again, I think a better written/tested recipe would have cautioned about using it to taste. Also, my shipment was missing the bean sprouts that were supposed to go in this. That's not a big deal; I'm generally an ingredient or two short when I go to the store because something's either out of stock or I forget.

Verdict? The food doesn't taste GREAT, but it's a good way to ensure you'll eat something reasonably healthy, even in the midst of a Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries binge, when meal planning and going to the grocery store seem too daunting. And at half price, it's about the same price as going to the grocery store (I didn't have any problems finding promo codes through Google). They're having a Memorial Day sale, so I ordered one more box to hold me over until my CSA starts in late June.

Cheap & Easy Hallway Art

I absolutely love the layout of my apartment, except for the never-ending tunnel hallway from the door to the living area. I wasn't sure how to handle decorating it, so I turned to Google. Very quickly, I found this post at Young House Love, where they hung pages from the "Travel the World" calendar from Rifle Paper Co in IKEA Ribba frames. I loved the look and set out to steal it entirely.

First step: buy the calendar. I was a little bummed that Rifle redesigned the 2015 version. Instead of abstract maps (I love maps!), the illustration was of a girl in a scene from the cities. [I'm okay with it now, though, because I just pretend it's an illustration of me driving a convertible around Monaco or snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef.] I got the calendar with tax and shipping for $30.

Step two: go to BFE (where IKEA is located) to buy frames. I specifically wanted IKEA Ribba ones because they were $9 each and came with mats that were already the right size. I've always cut my own mats, but I was aiming for a cheap & easy project and cutting nine mats wouldn't be easy, and getting nine cut wouldn't be cheap. I actually tried ordering the frames online, figuring the $15 in shipping was worth the time and gas I'd spend getting out there. But the package got lost en route, so I ended up driving out there anyway.

Step three: assembly. With those two hurdles out of the way, it was just a matter of ripping apart the calendar and assembling the frames. The whole assembly process took less than an hour.

Step four: hanging. A bit of tedious measuring and leveling, but it worked out.

Before (sad hallway):

After (hallway of travel fantasy):

 Up close:

I'm pretty happy with how these turned out, but I wish I had used different frames. The old calendar (from YHL) seemed to fit in the mats better. Maybe someday I'll take these apart and cut the mats a little larger (yeah right, that's way too much work). Also, these frames stick out an inch from the wall. In retrospect, lower profile frames would be much better in hallways. Every drunk person who has even been in my hallway (myself included) has bumped into them. One was even knocked off (again, alcohol). The frame came apart but somehow the glass stayed in tact. A little Gorilla Glue fixed that problem (I was dreading another trip to IKEA to replace it if that didn't work). 

After I made this, another version took over Pinterest using mats with larger openings. The author said she spent $100 and got the frames and mats from Hobby Lobby. I'm proud to say I have never spent a dime there and never will, but I'd assume similar deals can be found at Michael's or other big box craft stores.

Vegan steak.

I'm a sucker for vegan "novelty" food. When I saw Viana Cowgirl Veggie Steaks at Whole Foods a few months ago, I couldn't pass them up. I've never missed cow steak, but I really had to see what a vegan steak would be like (spoiler alert: it's like a well seasoned chunk of seitan).

I also had potatoes and carrots in the fridge. In true meat-and-potatoes fashion, I made sure there was nothing green on my plate:

I mashed the potatoes and added some raw garlic. For the carrots, I made the Sweet & Salty Maple Baby Carrots recipe from Appetite for Reduction (I just sliced the regular carrots and didn't bake them quite as long). Then I pan-fried the steak according to the package, which only took a few minutes.

My review? It won't fool anyone, but it had a good flavor and toothsome (such a dumb word) texture. It really needed some sort of sauce or gravy, though. It reminded me of whatever the meat was in the swiss steak my mom used to make, and I think it would be good in that type of preparation. I probably won't buy it again, but it was novel to eat "steak" for the first time in a decade.