Feeling Fancy: Five Courses of Vegan Love

Special occasions usually seem to call for dinners out, but sometimes it can be fun and more personal to stay in. I especially wanted to come up with a memorably romantic dinner for my partner this week as we celebrated the seven years we've been together through thick, thin, sick, health, grad school...twice... and everything else. Since the time around our actual anniversary was spent in the service of baking and the day itself was consumed by serving cookies, biscotti, crisps, bars, cupcakes, muffins and cake, like the one pictured below, to thousands and thousands of people at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival we agreed to reschedule our own celebration for the next week. Because really, what's seven days when you've already put in seven years?



This cake picture, incidentally, is pretty much the only picture I have from the festival, which goes to show how crazy it was... I mean to prevent me from taking pictures? The thought that I missed out on prime frosting macros, especially of the glorious caramel buttercream I made...it breaks me. The cake above however I did manage to take a picture of just before we sliced it up and passed it around. It was a chocolate hazelnut cake with a hazelnut milk ganache in the middle and vanilla bean buttercream on top. I wrapped it in a thin layer of chocolate that was melted on a chocolate transfer sheet to get the cool orange swirl pattern on it.

After making all this food for other people on what was actually my anniversary, I thought it would be good to cook up some love for two on our fauxniversary. Making a fancy meal to express your love for someone/s can seem daunting because the food you make is a gift and like all gifts that you make yourself rather than just buy outright, it's very personal and meaningful. It's also daunting to think of making a dinner that can be served without distraction, that is, without you running constantly over to the stove or assembling something before every course. Now, I'm not Dr. Love or Martha Stewart, but I have some suggestions for making a memorable, low-stress, delectable dinner that says I've got love for you.



I started our meal by putting out some mixed Spanish olives along with slices of a small baguette served to sop up the fresh herb-infused Spanish olive oil that I poured over the olives. The Spanish theme was a conscious choice intended to reference our recent trip to Barcelona. Picking food or ingredients that call up a shared experience, time, or memory welcomes reminiscing and makes emotion and consciousness a significant part of the meal.

In addition to calling up our time in Spain, the olives served another function. For multi-course meals, it can be useful to have a small starter that doesn't take much effort to prepare or set up and that can stay out on the table while you eat. Not only can a light starter take up the time while a first course warms up, but it serves as a nice filler throughout the meal as well. It can really help slow things down and keep the tone chill too if instead of running to get the next dish and making the dinner feel like it's on some specific schedule, you break off a bit of bread, have an olive or two, sip a drink, and talk until you're motivated to get the next thing out on the table. Slowly unveiling the dinner and letting it take hours to unfold can be a particular pleasure.



Soup is a great element to add to a multi-course meal. It's particularly helpful that it can be prepared completely ahead of time, and in fact is usually even better when it's had a chance to sit and develop a deeper, more coherent flavor. Elegance is easy to come by with soup too. Serve it from an unexpected vessel like a beautiful cocktail glass or a stemmed sorbet cup like the one above, add an unusual flourish to the top--it could be as simple as some fresh chopped herbs, as dramatic as a brightly colored swirl of puréed vegetable, or a striking infusion like the vegan cocoa nib infused cream that topped this roasted shallot and butternut squash soup.



Derived from Alice Medrich's brilliant book Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate, this soup ended up being a star of the meal. It was easy to veganize and made great use of a lovely butternut squash from our CSA. Taking a tip from Bazu, I was already thinking about simple and seasonal roasted vegetables that are easily elevated by the addition of shallots which caramelize in the oven and shoot the accompanying veggie through with sweet, rich, earthy flavor. This soup starts with those vegetables and builds even more flavor with the addition of some fresh herbs and a homemade vegetable stock. The cocoa nib cream garnish is just a further stroke of genius. There's the lightest chocolate flavor that is actually second to a stronger, earthier flavor that comes off more like a truffle (of the mushroom variety, not the confection) and is a wonderful complement to the sweetness of the squash and the caramel tones of the roasted shallots. I used Soyatoo for the cream, but there are a variety of vegan heavy creams on the market these days, including Alpro and Oat Supreme. Or you can make your own substitution with soy milk thickened with soy milk powder, soy yogurt, coconut cream, etc., depending on the demands of the dish.



Following the soup we had this salad, featuring radicchio and butter lettuce, a balance of bitter and sweet that is furthered by the addition of fresh slices of pear and apple, toasted walnuts and a tangy balsamic vinaigrette. The choice of sturdy "greens" (recognizing that radicchio is in fact purple) meant that I could dress and plate the salad in advance and just set it out on the table when we were ready for it. Picking out dishes that share ingredients and preparations is a big time saver too. Knowing that I was going to make use of walnuts in the pasta later, I toasted enough for the main dish and the salad all the same time.



Following the salad we had a slightly modified version of the Sherry and Sage Spuds that Marleigh recommended from Hot Knives. In their notes, they say that this dish will "put you down like a bong rip through apple cider." I have no idea what that means, but it sounded like an experience. The preparation was really quick and the potatoes were happy enough to hang out in their cast iron pot warming in the oven at 200 degrees until we were ready for them. Preparing the sauce ahead of time and keeping it cool in the fridge meant that it was as simple as dotting the plate with some sauce and piling some of the beautiful tiny purple Peruvian potatoes on the plate to

I spent some time looking for these purple potatoes to reference our trip to Peru last year where we saw and ate tons of different kinds of potatoes, some of which only grow on very specific terraces in very specific locations in Peru. They were a perfect choice too, sweet and soft, and with the fried sage cream sauce, they were out of control good. The sauce was a gamble for me, but one that paid off. I can usually take or leave Veganaise and mayonnaise type things in general, but though it is the base of this sauce, it's completely transformed by the sage infused oil. I definitely plan to experiment with this more, infusing oil with herbs and spices to mix into faux-mayonnaise to spread on sandwiches or serve with vegetables.

A quick note on my changes for this recipe: I used double the garlic called for and substituted rice vinegar for the sherry vinegar, which I didn't have, and it worked out quite nicely.



Blame it on a love and admiration-addled brain, but I somehow missed photographing the main course, which was a pasta dish with fresh egg-free parpadelle, a wide flat noodle, featuring these great local mushrooms that Steve, the farmer who runs our CSA, foraged for. I sautéed the mushrooms with garlic, olive oil and white wine and then added some arugula to the hot pan and let it wilt. Tossed with the fresh pasta and toasted walnuts, it was light but satisfying, simple but complexly flavored with all of the ingredients really coming through. It came together very quickly too and when it came time to eat it, I just pulled it off the low warming heat I had it on and piled some on a plate to share.



As anyone who has ever even looked at this blog will know (I sometimes feel a little bit ashamed of my tag cloud, which might just as well read CHOCOLATE), I was highly concerned with what to make for dessert. Marleigh came to the rescue with the suggestion of this double chocolate fig slice with brown sugar cream . It immediately captured my imagination, obviously...chocolate and figs? yes, please... and I set to work on veganizing it (my recipe is below). The result was an incredibly rich, super chocolately and decadent dessert with a great light crunch from the figs and a softly alcoholic tang from the marsala that helped it from getting too bogged down by the buttery chocolate intensity. It's like an insane sort of ultra-sophisticated brownie, and with a recommendation like that, how can you not try it?



The recipe calls for a brown sugar whipped cream to top the dessert, so I used the remaining Soyatoo from the cocoa nib cream on the soup and whipped it up with dark brown sugar. The sugar dissolves and turns the cream a beautiful creamy tan color and gives it more flavor and dimension, which helps take away the soy taste of the cream. This is the perfect kind of thing for fall desserts like apple crisps, pumpkin pies, and anything chocolate for sure.



So, all in all a fun and delicious meal that had me working with some new ideas and old favorites. It is generally a good idea to not go too crazy with completely new dishes or super fancy food that you and the people or person you're cooking for wouldn't normally eat when planning a special meal. Look for ways to elevate or make a twist on favorites rather than investing in a direction that you may not even like and which may be really challenging and may not be worth it.

When you're getting ready to make a multi-course meal for a special occasion, think about ways you can make something that will not only not stress you out, but will make you happy. Give yourself the time you need or scale back your plans to fit the time you have. Prioritizing dishes can be helpful, so that if, for example, you realize that you will not have time to finish everything you set out for yourself, you can just cross one thing off your list and still have an great meal to serve since you focused on the key dishes first. Have a strategy that will keep you where you belong, with your loved ones, rather than running back and forth to the kitchen all the time. You can invite your dinner partner to help finish a dish or do the final preparations on something and then share in the joy of the food and each other's company.

Double Chocolate Marsala Soaked Fig Cake

approximately 25 small dried black Mission figs (about 1 ½ cup)
½ cup Marsala wine
½ cup Earth Balance buttery stick, or other vegan margarine
7 oz. chopped chocolate, 60-70%
1 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons soy yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ unbleached all-purpose flour
¼ cocoa powder
2 tablespoons corn starch
¾ baking powder
¼ salt

1. Preheat oven to 350° and line a 8x8 pan with parchment paper, leaving overhang on two sides to give you a "handle" to remove the cake.

2.Gently heat the Marsala wine in a saucepan. While it warms, finely chop the figs. Stir the chopped figs into the warm wine, cover pan and remove from heat.

3. Bring a half full pot of water to a low boil. Gently set another pot filled with the chocolate and butter in a the hot water. Stir until they have both melted and are smooth. Stir the sugar, yogurt, and vanilla into the melted chocolate mixture. When mixed smooth, set aside for 5 minutes to cool.

4. In a separate bowl, sift dry ingredients together.

5. Mix dry ingredients and the chocolate mixture together until smooth, fold in the Marsala and figs, then spread the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 35 minutes. The edges should be set but a toothpick will come out of the centre slightly sticky. Let it cool in the pan on a baking rack. When cool, use the parchment to remove it from the pan. Cut and serve immediately or wrap in plastic to store.

To serve: warm the cake in the microwave for 20 seconds and then top with ½ cup Soyatoo whipped with 2 tablespoons of brown sugar.

Cranberry Bean and Tomato Soup

Right about now is the time of year soup gets back on my radar. Freakish 80 degree weather at the end of October aside, Boston is creeping into fall. Cool nights are making me encourage all of the cats to sleep on my feet and keep them warm, there are pumpkins and dried corn stalks everywhere, the leaves are crinkly and orange gold, the sky is darkening before I leave work, and Halloween is right around the corner. In other words, prime soup time.



Fall soups feel different and more vibrant to me than winter soups because they can still make use of lots of the fresh ingredients that are just petering out at the end of harvest rather than relying on things you've frozen or scrounged from the grocery store or the squash that you've been keeping in your basement for months (maybe that's just me--I got through the last of the squash we picked in November sometime in March). As some of you know, I've been particularly obsessed with the amazing heirloom tomato crop this year and every weekend I've been going down to the Farmer's Market hoping that there will be "just one more" week of tomatoes. I haven't been disappointed yet, but my hopes for this Saturday are pretty tentative.



So far though, the weather has been cooperating vis-à-vis my desire to eat fresh local tomatoes and I've been able to enjoy them in this fantastic soup which also features an sort of unusual local ingredient, the cranberry bean, more generically called the shell bean, or at least, that's what everyone seems to call them here in New England.

These beans are also a favorite in northern Italy where they are called borlotti beans. Though they also grow in Italy, the majority of borlotti beans for sale in Italy are actually cranberry beans from the United States. Gourmet Sleuth says that the beans are also known as borlotto, crab eye, roman, romano, rosecoco, and saluggia beans. Though pinto beans seem to be be recommended most often as a substitute, if you can find them, tongues of fire beans (which should win an award for best name of bean ever) are probably closer. Neither cranberry or tongue of fire beans are especially common varieties, but tongue of fire beans are popular in Spanish and Portuguese cooking and cranberry/borlotti in Italian, so you'll probably have more luck at stores which specialize in those cuisines and sell dried beans. Otherwise, I would suggest that white beans or great northerns make good substitutes as well and those are readily available in canned forms.



On the outside cranberry beans look like Barbie took a can of spray paint to them, but inside the actual beans are mostly white with tiny pink markings which disappear while they cook. They're fairly large as beans go, similar to pinto beans or great northerns and much bigger than a black bean. They have a pleasantly creamy texture and a lightly nutty flavor, which I've seen likened to a chestnut, though that wouldn't be my first point of comparison.

Lots of people swear by dried beans over canned, but if you've never had freshly shelled beans, you are in for a bit of a revelation. They cook quickly and get creamy inside while the skin holds up nicely on the out, giving it a bit of toothsome bite and texture. Well prepared dried beans come close, but this is an instance where really and truly most anyone can taste the difference of fresh. I found a source on the internet for dried cranberry beans though and I'm interested in seeing how they compare to using fresh.



All of the ingredients for this soup actually come together to throw a party for freshness. The tomatoes, the beans, the herbs, they all taste bright and vibrant, as well as comforting. I've made it three times and have grown to love it more with each iteration, though I knew at the first bowl that it was going to be one of my favorite soups. I began with the recipe for Cranberry Bean Soup in Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love, a tome of a cookbook that I highly recommend to anyone who loves vegetables, wants to learn about the social, geographical and culinary history of them, and has an eye for veganizing since it is explicitly not a veggie cookbook. She brilliantly begins the soup base by cooking down fresh tomatoes and it is the liquid from those tomatoes that makes up much of the broth for this soup. I can't say I'm a huge fan of tomato soup generally speaking, it seems a little cloying and flat to me, but this is something totally different, just the tiniest bit sweet, tangy, and rich with fruity olive oil and browned garlic.



There's lots of room for color variation if you're playing with heirloom tomatoes, more yellow gives you a golden broth, more red a fiery colored base. Tweaking the herbs will give you really different results too since every ingredient comes through beautifully in this soup. I liked the lemon thyme a lot and might consider adding just a little bit of lemon if lemon thyme weren't available. The final batch I made I used two cans of white beans. In that batch fresh tomatoes were the stars and I missed the substance, texture and bite of the beans, but it's still a stellar soup and one I know I'll be making through the darker, colder days ahead. You can make it too, I'll post the recipe below.



Also for the cooler days, I revisited a crème de cassis cupcake that I made last winter during the coldest day of the year in Boston. Crème de cassis is a blackcurrant liqueur that I was first introduced to as a great thing to add to a little champagne for celebrations. It is made from crushed blackcurrants that ferment into alcohol. I prefer less sweet recipes and have tended to really like the varieties that say specifically "Crème de Cassis de Dijon." The deep wine flavors and blackberry-currant bite on these were a great follow-up dessert to the soup and the cake is a beautiful soft purple-brown, which is not unlike the paint color of my living room and dining room walls. The name of that paint color is swiss-mocha, which has never made any sense to me and henceforth I will think of it as crème de cassis cupcake.


Cranberry Bean Tomato Soup
adapted from Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love

3 Tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup chopped shallot
4 cloves minced garlic
2 ½ pounds chopped tomato
1 pound shelled cranberry beans (or other fresh shelled bean, dry beans soaked overnight and drained, or 2 cans rinsed and drained beans)
1 ¾ cup water
20 leaves fresh basil, divided, chopped
5 leaves fresh sage, chopped
1 teaspoon fresh thyme or lemon thyme
1 teaspoon sea salt
black pepper to taste

In a medium sauce pan, heat the olive oil and add shallots and garlic, stir over medium heat until shallots are clear and garlic is lightly browned.

Add chopped tomato and stir occasionally for about 20 minutes or until they have released liquid and are very soft.

Stir in beans and water and allow it to cook for another 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add half of the basil along with the sage, thyme, salt and pepper, stir well and let simmer for about two minutes.

To serve, top with remaining basil leaves.

Hazelnut Quince Cake, In Three Acts

As naturally and constantly as I breath or blink, I think about food. There are times when this gastronomic backdrop is a little more distracting than others, like when I recognize a craving that must be sated or when I get something stuck in my head, like figs or cornbread or date sugar, an ingredient or a dish that I can't stop considering until I do something with it. Recently this happened to me with quince. For the last month, quince has been the unholy fruit equivalent of a song that I cannot get out of my head, no matter how hard I try.



I ran into quince at a nearby ginormous Whole Foods that recently expanded and in so doing created a supermarket version of produce heaven. I'd been doing a cartoonish swoon all around the store and had degenerated into stuttering raptures at the tropical fruit section when I spotted the quince. At first I thought it was a stray apple, then I wondered if it wasn't an oddly shaped pear, finally I deduced that it was quince. I was immediately captivated. Certainly, I've read about quince and seen recipes for it, but had never eaten it or cooked with it. Straight into the basket it went.

For the next two weeks, the quince was kind of a running joke. I may have talked about it too much. Friends would come over and point at it, "Is that the quince? Are you ever going to use it?" "How are you? How're the cats? How's your quince?" In that time, just having the quince was like a project. I checked on it every day, waiting for it to be ripe. When ripe, the quince is fragrant, so much so that it used to be employed as a room deodorizer. It is always firm (some describe it as a "rock hard" fruit) even when ripe, but its heady scent is the mark of its ripeness. Daily I sniffed, I prodded, and I thought as it ripened on the window sill. What would be best to do with my quince?



The answer, of course, was cake, or, more precisely, cakes.

Having never had quince, I relied on my reading about it and followed some intuition, which put me on an autumnal flavor palate. Indeed, quince is a fall fruit. Its season runs from September through to December or January, though in some parts of the world it is available for much longer, even into March. Originally, quince grew in the stretch of land between the Caspian and Black seas in the Caucasus region, which dips into Turkey and Iran. It had an early cultivation, which brought it into Mesopotamia where it was known as the "golden apple." Many historians hypothesize that it was quince and not what we know today as an apple that was actually referenced in biblical stories. Certainly, it was considered a godly fruit for the Greeks, who continued its cultivation, carrying it into the Mediterranean.



There are a lot of intriguing ideas for using quince that come out of its Persian and Mediterranean history--stews and sweets especially. Currently most commercial quince crops are located in South America, particularly in Argentina where it is popularly used to make candies and hard jellies or pastes called dulce membrillo, which are used in desserts and as the filling for sandwiches. Quince once enjoyed a good deal of popularity in Europe and America as a good fruit for jellies and sauce since it has naturally high levels of pectin. So that is where I decided to experiment, making a sauce with the quince and some deliciously ripe early fall pears.



The floral fall sweetness of pear is a great complement to the tartness of the quince, which does mellow as it cooks, but often needs some quantity of sugar to be palatable (in a traditionally Western sense anyway). I found raw quince to be not preciously pleasant to eat. It was sharp, astringent and extremely dry in the way that guava is, though it lacks the kind of tropical sweetness guava offers.



Three small peeled and diced bosc pears, a scraped vanilla bean, and a shot of agave went into a saucepan along with the peeled and diced quince to cook down to something more enjoyable. Quince does take its time in softening up from its firm state, but as it does, it becomes even more fragrant and turns a soft rose color. Its texture doesn't get as soft as pears or apples might, but it's actually quite nice combined with the softer fruit, adding another textural element to the sauce.



The sauce was the central player in the cake I had been concieving of, playing with in my mind, thinking through the different possibilities. I let it cool as I worked on putting together a light hazelnut cake to sandwich it with. Though all nuts have a kind of winter/fall feel for me, hazelnuts particularly so, which made them a perfect match to the seasonal quince and pear. While a general rule for combining flavors is "what grows together goes together," seasonal commonality is also a good indicator that ingredients will take to each other. In this case, it turns out that hazelnuts and quince satisfy the "grow together" maxium as well as sharing a seasonal tie, since they too were originally found in the Caucasus region and are harvested in September and October.



To get a lot of hazelnut flavor without a heavy cake, I used a toasted hazelnut oil and some hazelnut liqueur instead of actual nuts in the cake. The result was just what I wanted, light, nutty, softly rich. Slivered hazelnuts made a nice garnish for the cake and gave a bit more of the hazelnut flavor without overwhelming the cake. To balance the sweet floralness of the quince and pear filling and to complement the rich hazelnuts, a mocha buttercream seemed like just the thing. And because I couldn't help myself, good dark chocolate drizzled over the whole thing along with some decorative bits of chocolate that I melted on a transfer sheet to get the flower design.



The picture above is of the full-sized version of this cake that I made for my friend Laura's birthday. You can see clearly the thick band of chocolate in this one that I used to wrap the cake. The trick to using transfer sheets in this way (rather than just letting the chocolate cool on them and chopping it up for decoration) is spread the chocolate evenly with an offset spatula and allowing it to set for a few minutes before gently pressing the still soft chocolate into shape around the cake. Then you just need to be patient and let the chocolate cool completely before peeling away the transfer sheet.


Laura's was a four layer cake with alternating fillings. Lacking the time to invest in another quince, but still enamored of it as a fruit, I was thrilled to hit on a jar of German quince jelly, which I spread thickly between some layers while a thick gingered pear sauce made with small speckled pears from the farmer's market filled out the others.



I liked the slightly spicy element of ginger along with the tart-sweet of quince and pear and wondered how it would be as a more pronounced flavor. Tasting some candied ginger along with the quince jelly and nuts, it seemed to me that the strong ginger could easily overpower the cake as I had conceived of it in earlier incarnations. So, instead of the light mocha buttercream, I decided to go all out with a super rich ganache to top the cake. Since I was making mini cakes again I thought that I could probably get away with amping the richness on the cakes as well, but went a bit too far in messing with thing when I decided to use hazelnut milk.



While it may work out well used in a sparing way, my attempt at substituting fresh hazelnut milk (made by pureeing raw hazelnuts with water and then straining out the pulp) for all of the soy milk I had used in the previous recipes, resulted in cakes that were way too heavy. The cake was less cake than it was like some kind of hazelnut candy filling. A delicious candy, but candy none-the-less. This is likely because hazelnuts are so fatty (it's almost all "good fat," but they are among the fattiest of nuts) and it made the cake wet, crumbly, and a little saggy. Luckily, the ganache was useful in holding the cake and fruit all together in one decadent package. Ganache is the great saviour of many a baking mistake.

This incarnation was also too heavy for the quince and pear to shine through, so that missed the point a little bit, but I managed to scratch the quince itch twice, so I might be able to move on now. And anyway, the delight of chocolate with a little bit of fruit and nut was certainly no great burden.

Vegan in Barcelona

Sorry for the posting slump, I was in Spain and now I'm in pain. Both states of being have kept me off the computer, and while Spain was a wonderful diversion, the pain is an unwelcome distraction.

I put pictures of Barcelona on Flickr if anyone would like to see more of the beautiful city than just the food I ate there!

As the photo above reveals, I got to spend the last week in Barcelona, where, as I craned my neck around to scope out the sites in the gorgeous and dynamic city, I cracked my wrist hard into a flourish on a stone wall (Barcelona is full of flourish). Upon returning home I went to work in the kitchen making a cake (what else?) and since I was babying the one wrist, I fumbled on a shelf and ended up dropping a waffle iron, which crashed down from several feet above me onto my already sore wrist. As an aside, this is the waffle iron which came in a box that proclaimed "waffles are a healthy choice for today's lifestyle." It's always struck me as a funny thing to say, so we make a lot of jokes about waffles and healthy choice, but suffice to say, waffles were NOT a healthy choice for Sunday, October 6th's lifestyle.

In the Emergency Room the intake nurse scrawled something about my sad tale and the attack issued upon me by the waffle iron. Her penmanship was such that the Physician's Assistant, upon reading my paperwork, asked me what I wanted with Dr. Cool Waffle. Huh? I was afraid I'd ended up in the psych ward for a moment, but then it came to me: Dr. Cool Waffle = dropped a cool waffle [iron]. Cool, since it was not hot and I had no burns, which was the medical team's first fear. We waited around for a while and then finally consulted with Dr. Cool Waffle. Now I'm wrapped in a cast up to my elbow and am unhappy, but hoping for good news when I actually see the wrist and hand surgeon tomorrow.



Ok, grumbles aside, let's talk food. I was really mixed on my expectations for eating vegan in Barcelona. On one hand I was excited by the excellent listing of vegetarian and health food stores in Barcelona featured on Sin Carne (Without Meat), but I'd also heard from people who've visited that even vegetarian eating can be a challenge there. There's this thing with jamón (ham) that finds its way into everything and squid ink and so on. Overall, I'd say it takes a little planning and a little bit of proficiency with Spanish, but that you can do just fine as a vegan in Barcelona.



We rented an short term apartment in the city, which I've found to be a great way to go as a vegan, as a budget conscious traveler, and as someone who likes to eat a "real" breakfast (which more often than not in Barcelona involved the thick hot drinking chocolate pictured above). Having the apartment means that there's a kitchen to store and prepare food in and no waiting around in the morning to get breakfast out. Upon arriving we scoped out a health food store and a market for produce to get stocked up with ingredients for making breakfasts in the apartment and some dinners and easily transported lunches to throw in a bag. This plan of attack has worked out really well in Budapest, where I can also highly recommend Zsofi and her BudaVeg apartment, and in Prague. In Barcelona having the apartment was a bit of a life-saver since meals out were so very expensive. I'm talking $7 tapas-sized hummus plates.



Sin Carne lists all the vegetarian and health food shops in the city, so our first stop was Vegetalia to get food at the restaurant and supplies from the small health food store that shares space with the restaurant. From the store we grabbed unsweetened soy yogurt, organic wine, tofu, seitan, chocolate, you know, essentials. At the restaurant, which had the feel of a cozy neighborhood stop in and say "hi" kind of place, with an open kitchen and lots of magazines and books to read, we ordered a lot of seitan to try to replenish our starved bodies after the terrible airplane food.



It was good and filling, the kabobs above particularly so, but not notably flavorful or interesting. It was also all covered in sprouts. Maybe it's the sprouts, but this meal had me thinking about the cuisine as kind of "second-wave" vegetarian fare. I don't think this is a classification that anybody actually uses, and it's somewhat imprecise and Western-centric, since it collapses hundreds of years of vegetarianism into a first wave, identifes the 1970s health-food movement in the US as the start of the second wave and puts a third wave somewhere in the past 10-15 years with the beginning of both more "gourmet" vegetarian and vegan restaurants and the DIY vegan cookzines that started de-emphasizing "healthiness" while veganizing comfort foods. Whether or not this classification is useful, it points at the sort of dated quality I felt the veg food in Barcelona had overall.



This was supposed to be seitan carpaccio, which is a sort of generous way of making reference to the dried out seitan slices they served. Again, it certainly wasn't bad, it just wasn't exciting. However, Vegetalia is a great place to hang out and drink sangria, look over books and chat. I'd certainly go again, if it weren't half way around the world and all.



I was extremely excited by the Mercat de la Boqueria, a bustling covered market that was overflowing with beautiful produce. It was ordered such that the fruits, vegetables, nuts and dried goods were upfront and the dead things were toward the back, so it was just a sea of beautiful produce as we wandered the mercat picking things out to bring back the apartment. There were gorgeous stalls overflowing with tons of in season mushrooms and local tomatoes. Now, I know this is more a function of how lousy the dollar is that how expensive Barcelona is, but I did have to draw the line when two beautiful tomatoes came to 8 Euros, about $15. I did splurge with great joy though at a stand that featured an array of tropical fruits, some of which I haven't had since I was a kid in Malaysia.



The big white sphere on the right is a rambutan, we used to have a rambutan tree at our house in Malaysia. The flavor is indescribable, though it is similar in texture to the lychee, which has gotten much more popular in the US than the rambutan. I got some great lychees too, and a brilliantly bright passion fruit. In the middle of the plate is a mangosteen, which was my favorite find. I have never seen it for sale in the US. The mangosteen is sometimes called the queen of fruits in Southeast Asia. Queen to the durian's king. I much prefer the queen--durian is stinkier than I can handle. A couple gorgeous figs and slices of ripe pear completed the perfect fruit plate for breakfast.



We ate it with hot chocolate and fresh bread from the bakery downstairs. Throw the door open to the porch just to the left of the dining table, let the sun and breeze of a Spanish morning drift in, and all of a sudden eating in to save money is absolutely no sacrifice. Rather, it's a privilege.



Other mornings we made quick tofu or seitan scrambles with roasted red peppers (a local favorite) and tons of great olives and tomatoes. In the evening, similarly quick food featuring local ingredients made it part of the fun of traveling somewhere new, even while we stayed in for dinner. Olives, olives, olives and great roasted red peppers made it into everything--quick pastas with white beans and sundried tomatoes, bean patties and salads, fresh local greens with walnuts and beets and a bottle of local wine, especially cava--we ate well and at a fraction of the price. Which is not to say that we never ate out.



The best place we went though, without a doubt, was Sesamo. We went against our provincial leanings and snacked at 7pm to tide over until a more fashionable 10:30pm for dinner. The restaurant didn't even start serving until 9:30pm. After all of our other experiences with veggie restaurants in Barcelona, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was instantly in love with it. The space is intimate with an open kitchen and bright colors and candle light. And the food--wow. Creative, flavorful, beautiful, satisfying, intriguing, local, seasonal, organic and very vegan friendly. It's comida sin bestias, but they still do make use of lots of dairy on the menu. I had the "jade pillars" pictured above and they are one of the best things I've eaten in a while. The thin slices of cucumber were rolled around a smoky tofu cheese and settled in a salty-sweet sauce. I tried not to moan too much while eating them.



The salad was also excellent, a bed of local rocket topped with a perfect pear and surrounded by a very generous sprinkling of candied nuts. The server also brought out a dish of olives, a whole wonderful assortment of about 7 different kinds. A basket of fresh baked bread along with the olives made wonderful snacking until the entrees came.



The main course was the only vegan dish they had that night, but the menu is never static at Sesamo and the server said they often have more vegan dishes on the menu. They can veganize dishes too, but our server said that the one dish we asked about wouldn't "be fun" as a vegan dish and recommended this instead. I appreciate honesty and I appreciated this dish which was made up of pumpkin and potatoes and topped with lightly steamed veggies and lots of fresh black pepper.



For dessert they had two different vegan options. One was a plate of vegan truffles with a large plain chocolate truffle in the center, accompanied by mint chocolate truffles and two mocha truffles on either side. The other was a vegan black forest cake with tofu cream between the layers. The truffles were excellent and right up my alley. Plate of chocolate, yes, thank you, no need to leave a fork…I’ll just go ahead and eat these with my face. They were dark and creamy smooth with subtle flavorings that were nicely balanced by the chocolate. The cake was good, but the cream was super tofuy. I love tofu and do use it in baking, but a pastry cream that is tofu-based needs a little dressing up and some quality time in a food processor.

Juicy Jones is the vegan restaurant in Barcelona. It’s just recently opened up a second branch in a very hip area of town and maintains its original location in the basement of a Barri Gótic neighborhood. We went to both locations, once for lunch and once for dinner. They are pretty much exactly the same, offering the same kind of daily specials menu and the same hyper-fluorescent fruit and veg décor. I’d suggest visiting the Juicy Jones in Barri Gótic where the dining room is separate from the juice bar for a more pleasant dinning experience since Juicy Jones is known for its fresh juices and shakes which means the juicer and blender maintain a pretty constant auditory presence.

The menú del día at Juicy Jones is definitely the way to go. For about 9 Euros you get a large mixed salad or a soup of the day, an entree and a dessert. The salad loses points for lettuce that had to be attacked with the butter knife in order to transform it into something that had hope of actually fitting in a person's mouth. And of course, it was topped with handfuls of sprouts, but was big and had great olives and peppers. The soup was good both times. We had a great gazpacho that was cool and loaded with garlic and olive oil and a miso that was rich and warming.

The main course changes daily and could be pizza with vegan cheese, lasagna, gnocchi, etc. or you can opt for a thali and receive an assortment of Indian-style curries. I say Indian-style because its certainly Indian by way of Barcelona, the curries are mild and differently spiced. My thali had two curries that contained under-cooked potatoes, but their twist on dal was delicious. The pizza and lasagna were both pretty good, but bland. There are four choices for dessert—a despairingly sweet kolfi (an Indian pudding with fruit and nuts), a cookie that should be ashamed of itself, a mango lassi that is too sweet but probably the best way to go, and a postre which seems hit or miss. We had “banana cake” which was exactly the kind of beast people who disparage vegan baking are thinking of as they disparage and a chocolate cake that was good taste-wise but exploded in a dry mess of crumbs when we cut into it.

Tapioca soup at Arco Iris

The menú del día at Arco Iris is a little risky for vegans, but the lunch-time only vegetarian café is located very near a mandatory site in Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia, so it’s worth trying. It’s an airy and sunny place with a very friendly staff. There are three choices for each of four courses—salads, boiled veggies, veggie burgers, soups, and for dessert, fruit. We had boiled potatoes and cabbage, bread and olives, great melon, and the strangest soup ever, a tapioca soup. The server and I had to go back and forth on it for a while at first since I was sure I was misunderstanding her when she said “tapioca soup.” “It’s sweet?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “But…?” After confirming that it was vegan we agreed to try it. It was really tapioca, the gelatinous stuff that sweet puddings and bubble drinks are made from, but in a savory, salty soup. It was thick as a gel, but the texture wasn’t as disturbing as I might have guesses and the soup was filling and tasty.



Though tapas are not originally a Catalan specialty, they are immensely popular in Barcelona and there are some vegan things on traditional tapas menus, but not many. My favorite spot that we stopped at to enjoy some small plates of food was the beautiful medieval stone courtyard at the Museu Texil I d’Indumentaria, which is also just across the street from the Picasso Museum. They have a range of nice tea infusions like fresh mint with light green tea and plates of hummus, guacamole, escalivada (eggplant, red peppers and onion) and marinated mushrooms served with warm bread and fresh corn chips.

One thing that I thought a lot about in Barcelona, and especially on the plane where we were served some truly bad food, was how some people who are not vegetarian or vegan tend to think about eating veg in terms of deprivation. It's all about what someone is not eating. The food made in this deprivation mindset then is food that feels like it is missing something. It’s not much fun to eat because it’s maimed and hobbled, it is deprived because its conceived of as being deprived.

The joy and bounty of vegan options and the excitement about the delicious possibilities of ethical eating seem to me a vital part of veg advocacy, and indeed, this seems like a core motivating principal of contemporary veganism. As I ate some food in Barcelona that seemed like a product of the "bad old days" of vegetarian cookery, I thought a lot about how great it is that soon the "but it doesn't taste vegan" comment will be a thing of the past because it just won't make sense--most vegan products taste just as good or better than anything else. But I hope that good food is not the end of the story for veganism. I don't think that is the case at all, but I was thinking that I might be willing to go back to politically-informed sprouts and bland tofu if the trade-off were to be completely apolitical gourmet veganism. I have faith though in a future that includes delicious vegan truffles and right-on politics. The revolution will be delicious. Right? Right.