Saray - Packard's Corner Turkish Restaurant

I've been living in the same neighborhood in Allston for a little over a year. Close to Lower Allston, right in between Union Square and Packard's Corner. The rent is cheap, it's close to work, and there are several restaurants with vegan options very close by. In a city like this, by which I mean a city prone to very cold, wet weather and/or snowdrifts that come up to my hips, you need a place you can briskly walk to when you're not up for cooking.

But I'm bored!

I can't go to Grasshopper--my lower intestines can't take it!
I can't go to Punjab Palace--they won't make my food without chilis!
I can't go to Allston Cafe--their food is boring, their selections are often out of stock, and their coffee isn't very good.
I can't go to Toki--it's too cold for maki!
And I can't go to Peace O' Pie because I can't afford it!

And then, there was Turkish food.

My experience with Middle Eastern food is limited to dips and kebabs--hummus, baba gannoush, falafel, beef or lamb kebabs. The first three are vegan staples. But now my experience with Turkish food is much more broad--it includes salad, okra, and tea.

We started off our meal at Saray in Packard's Corner with a hummus plate and a salad of tomato, cucumber, and red onion tossed with olive oil, lemon juice, and parsley (ezme salatasi). The salad was light and refreshing, a really good start, and a very generous portion, meant for sharing.

But the hummus.

The hummus was the best I have ever had. The texture was just right--smooth and creamy, but still robust. It had a touch of lemon juice and garlic, perfectly seasoned with salt. If you love hummus, you have got to try Saray's. It's $4 for about 3/4 of a pint, so there's plenty to share with your table.

For our entree, we had the domatesli bamya, okra with tomatoes, onions, and garlic. It was incredible. Several full cloves of garlic softened in a stew of fragrant tomato and okra, served with rice. If you're not sure about okra, this would be a great introduction.

For dessert, we split an order of baklava. When I've had baklava in the past it's been very dry, with layers of phyllo dough and walnuts lightly sweetened with honey (or agave). This baklava was soaked in sugary syrup, so it had softened considerably, and was topped with crushed pistachios.

I had the best possible experience with a new cuisine--one of our tablemates was from Turkey. When she asked if we wanted Turkish coffee or tea, I had to say yes.

I've had Turkish coffee before. It's very strong, served in small cups, almost silty with fine coffee grounds, and usually taken with sugar. It was a little late for coffee, so I decided to try the tea. The reddish amber liquid was served in a thin, tulip-shaped, transparent glass (called ince belli) and came with sugar. It was incredibly fragrant, not too strong, and had a floral taste. An excellent finish to our meal.

If you're bored with the food selection in Boston, I'd highly recommend Saray. The food was simple and elegant, and according to our tablemate, very authentic. Price-wise it's on the expensive side, but splitting entrees and appetizers kept us all full and we had plenty to take home after. The service was fast and our waitress was very friendly and helpful.

Sauvignon Blanc

Jeff and I bottled 29 bottles of our Sauvignon Blanc a few weeks ago. It was an interesting process. The kit we bought came with a neat siphon gadget that has a plunger in the bottom. We figured that we'd put these in the bottles, push down to start the flow of wine, and then let up when the bottle was full. Bad idea. They filled up about half way before the siphon lost its suck and the wine stopped flowing. Then we had to restart the siphon, which can be a messy production consisting of water getting all over the floor. Finally we decided to use the siphon hose straight up without the auto-siphon at the end. Until I realized that the flow valve might be a good idea to use we made quite a mess as wine spilled all over the floor at a high flow rate while I was going in between bottles.

The wine has been sitting for almost a month, and we have opened and drank a few bottles already. I'm hoping that the mildly strong bouquet will go away with time, I think it probably comes with the sulfites that are added right before bottling the wine. Honestly, I would like to do without sulfites entirely but I am not sure how else to sterilize the wine. I know that some people do without, but I would be worried about wild yeasts giving our wine a vinegar taste. The wine kit also recommends adding the sulfites if you want to let the wine age for more than six months in bottles. Clearly, I'd like to let my wine age, so I added it just to make sure it won't go bad.

We'll try some before Thanksgiving to make sure it tastes good enough to bring to Jeff's for the holiday. If it's good by then, it'll also be good enough to give as holiday gifts in December. I just need to print out some labels to put on the bottles.

Right now our cider wine is settling. We used sparkalloids, which are a mix of some polysaccharides and diatomaceous earth, as far as I can tell on my Google searches. It takes longer to clear than isinglass, but I'm really happy not to be putting any fish bladder in my wine! For our next batch, Jeff and I will have to find a wine kit that doesn't have any pre-packed inside the box. (The first wine kit we purchased came with the grape juice as well as all the packets of sterilizers and fining agents.)

Autumn Harvest Stew

Alyssa and I have been receiving shipments of produce from Boston Organics since last winter. We recently changed our shipment from the small box (1/2 fruit, 1/2 veggies) to the regular-sized box (1/3 fruit, 2/3 veggies) because quite frankly, we're addicted to fresh, varied, organic produce.

We opt out of a few items to make the box more local and tailored to what we will eat over the course of 2 weeks. We used to get lettuce, but it turned out that only I would eat it. Eating a big salad every night was nice, but not fair between the two of us. We also used to get bananas, but would rather support more local produce. They are good about offsetting items on your "no-list" with other offerings that are available that week, such as an extra squash or head of broccoli.

Last week's box included Sweet Potatoes, Summer Squash, Beets, and Parsnips. After a long Sunday of cleaning the apartment, a stew was in order. We had some onions, garlic, mushrooms, ginger and carrots laying about so we gathered all the veggies together:


and chopped them up!

In the pot they went, with a half gallon of water, a little wine, and a blend of spices. While the pot was simmering, Alyssa and I set out tidying up the apartment. I went out to get a wood saw for another one of our projects, and when I came back the apartment smelled amazing. After another 30 minutes or so, the wait was unbearable. The Autumn Harvest Stew was perfect for the appetite we had worked up from projects that afternoon. The stew was delicious! In all, it should last us for about 3 meals, and it is highly recommended that bread accompany this dish.

Next time we will likely leave out the beets from the stew:


They look really funky and are really awesome to cook with on their own, but their sweetness can dominate a dish. In this case they clashed a bit with the earthy flavors of the other vegetables.

We might be making another Autumn Harvest Stew in a couple of weeks when our next shipment comes in. Here's what's going to be in the next box:
"2 Anjou Pears (WA)
0.75 lbs Empire Apples (VT)
1.5 lbs Fair Trade Bananas (Ecuador)
2 Navel Oranges (FL)
1 head Cauliflower (NY)
0.75 lbs Celery Root (MA)
1.5 lbs Delicata Squash (MA)
1 head Green Leaf Lettuce (MA)
1 bunch Kale (MA)
1 4oz Mixed Sprouts (MA)
0.75 lbs Mixed Summer Squash (FL)
1 lbs Purple Top Turnips (MA)"

Vegan White Hot Chocolate Recipe

What's a vegan who loves white chocolate to do? I've tried to make my own, but have never gotten this recipe to work, even after five or six attempts. Fortunately, Cosmo's Vegan Shop carries white chocolate chips, and they had a booth at this weekend's Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. I bought five bags and stuck them in my freezer.

I decided to make some white hot chocolate last night, and there are a lot of recipes out there that call for heavy cream or half and half, but I decided to just keep it simple.

Vegan White Hot Chocolate
Yield: 1 Serving
1 C soymilk
1/4 C white chocolate chips
1/8 t vanilla extract
1 oz Kahlúa (optional)

Heat up the soymilk in a saucepan, and when it starts to get foamy, add the chocolate chips. Whisk it until it melts and combines with the soymilk. Add the vanilla extract and taste. If you like a stronger vanilla flavor, put in a bit more extract. Pour into mugs and enjoy! If you'd like a more grown up version, I added a jigger-full of french vanilla Kahlúa, and it was divine.



White Chocolate

Peace 'o Pie, Allston, MA

Jeff and I just went to Peace 'o Pie, the new vegan pizza shop in Allston, MA. It replaces TJ Scallywaggle's House of Vegan Pizza, which Jeff and I would hit up every other week almost religiously for their 10$ all-you-can eat buffet. It's certainly nice to have a vegan pizza place open again. It was getting a bit depressing for a while here in the Allston/Brighton/Brookline area when TJ's closed up shop and My Thai closed their Brookline location in favor of Chinatown.

It's not that Jeff and I eat out often, these days we go out once a month at best, but it's still nice to know that there are vegan places out there for the rare occasions when we don't feel like cooking, and I'm glad they exist for people who, unlike us, prefer not to cook.

For simplicity's sake I'll re-post my Yelp review of Peace 'o Pie below if you are interested. I gave them 4 stars.

---
I really enjoyed TJ's, so I came to Peace 'o Pie very skeptical of the idea of "gourmet" pizza. I like my pizzas plain and simple without fancy stuff overwhelming the flavor. I have to say that I was very impressed with their pizza. I got a large "Fresh" pizza, which was sauce, Vegan Gourmet cheese, pesto, broccoli and onions. The sauce was delicious, the pesto was great, and the other toppings were good as well.

I would give Peace 'o Pie 5 stars were it not for the price. A large pizza was 18$ and while filling, I feel that's pretty expensive for a pizza. The toppings were also sparse and the cheese didn't even cover the entire pizza.

As far as the ambiance goes I liked the feeling of TJ's more, but I like how Peace 'o Pie has more sitting room with tables instead of booths. I do agree with one commenter who mentioned the lack of animal rights literature. I liked that you could always find a pamphlet about something at TJ's, or the most recent anarchist newsletter. Peace 'o Pie definitely caters to the more yuppie-ish, upper middle class vegan set.

I asked the owner if he plans to do a buffet, and it's not in the works for now. I'll probably go back to Peace 'o Pie every now and again, and I'm sure if they do a biweekly buffet I'll be there rain or shine as I did at TJ's. Peace 'o Pie definitely has good service, they know how to make a good pizza, and I feel like they have a better business mindset that will avoid the financial problems that TJ's was so burdened with.

Finally, I liked how clean the place was. That was the only thing that bugged me about TJ's, was how the booths always seemed to be covered in a layer of grime. They keep the tables at Peace 'o Pie very clean, and I'm sure it'll keep looking nice as time goes on.

New Projects

I haven't been posting much but Jeff and I have been up to lots of new projects in our new apartment. It's nice having a kitchen big enough for two of us to work without bumping elbows trying to slice veggies.

Our vegetable garden has been a great success, so far I've eaten probably a dozen yellow plum cherry tomatoes from my giant tomato plant; we've had four ripe orange and one green habañeros for hot sauce and two ho-chi-minh chiles (one ripened to yellow). The Thai chile plant has at least two dozen tiny chiles and one has burst into a bright red color seemingly overnight. Unfortunately our strawberry plant is in recovery from some spider mites but they seem to be gone (for now) and our one strawberry is starting to get bigger.

We've also started on some bigger projects. Last month we bought a wine making kit and some grape juice (sauvignon blanc grape juice), and it's busy clarifying right now for the next two weeks. Unfortunately, our kit came with isinglass which we used as we didn't have anything else for clarifying, so our wine isn't actually vegetarian. Next time we will research alternatives and make a totally vegan wine.

I've got some pickles that have been jarred (it was my first time canning!) and they're sitting until early October. I made some quick pickles a few weeks ago and they were delicious, so I hope these come out just as good. I want to can some pumpkin butter next, and now that I have a real pumpkin to use (instead of canned), I'm excited to try that out.

Jeff and I also experimented with soda and made a batch of ginger ale using a great recipe online. We found sassafras root bark at Harvest Co-op and purchased some to make root beer. Maybe I'll try that out this weekend. The ginger ale was delicious, although it was completely unlike any commercial soda I have ever consumed. It's got a bit of a beer-y taste, which is not surprising considering the soda is made by a yeast process. There's actually a tiny bit of alcohol in the soda (nothing you can really tell by drinking one bottle of it) and the carbonation is quite pleasing. I used quick bread yeast, but I think I'll experiment with ale yeasts once I get to the homebrew store again.

In the meantime, if you want to keep up with our soda or wine making exploits, check out or Facebook pages for them.

Okara Burgers and Zucchini Bread

Alyssa and I just moved into our new place, and have been unpacking boxes for the past few days. Naturally, the kitchen supplies and equipment were at the top of our list to unpack. We are loving the new kitchen space (previously cooking out of a kitchenette) and have not only unpacked all our stuff, but brewed soda, began fermenting wine, made a huge batch of hot sauce, and canned a bunch of pickles. Before this weekend we hadn't tried any of these things, but what a great time to try something new.

Along with these, I made a batch of soymilk. The thing with making soymilk is that the fresh milk is great if you can get used to the bean-ey taste. We've used it in the past with our recipes with no noticeable difference from storebought soymilk. What is inconvenient with the process is that you are left with the pulpy bean bits that don't make it through the filter into the finished product. These bean bits are called Okara, and until now we didn't have the slightest inclination to use them. They did make good compost, but they would weigh down the trash if the compost was full.

Keeping with the adventurous theme of the weekend, I searched for a recipe in The Book of Tofu. This book deserves credit, as the soy milk recipe and most other Tofu recipes in the Joy of Cooking are derived from this book. The recipe is not vegan (it calls for egg), but it's easily veganized. I used egg replacer instead of the 1 egg that it calls for, plus a tablespoon or two of water to get the burger mixture to the right consistency.



The burgers ended up being much more cohesive that was expected. We had made bean burgers in the past that used vital wheat gluten, but the egg replacer and whole wheat flour held the Okara together quite nicely. The burgers were cooked in the cast iron skillet:





A few minutes of browning on each side and they were done, just in time for the Savory Zucchini Bread to come out of the oven. The Zucchini Bread recipe was from vegalicious:

Vegalicious Savory Zucchini Bread

We found that adding 1/4 C more soymilk than the recipe called for was required for the dough to be moist and cohesive. Alyssa didn't like the italian spices that was called for, so we made another one without them. I thought both were delicious, especially sopping up mushroom gravy.





We also replaced the 1/4 C vegan butter with 1/8 C Canola Oil, skipped sauteing the onions, and didn't squeeze out the zucchini. It came out great nonetheless. It always feels good to improvise a recipe and have it turn out much better than expected. This was the perfect end to a great weekend.



Okara

More Cupcakes

I finally got to try out my pastry decorator that I got as a birthday present to myself. Actually, I used it a while back to pipe "custard" filling into cupcakes for Jeff's birthday, but that didn't turn out too well. This time I had lovely, fluffy "buttercream" frosting (vanilla and chocolate) from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and piped it onto vanilla and chocolate raspberry cupcakes.

The cupcakes were a big success at the potluck I went to, and I was very pleased at how they turned out, other than the vanilla frosting looking like it was separating a bit. (I wonder if it was the near 90 degree heat and lack of refrigeration while waiting for the T.) I topped them with some Sprinklez.

All of the recipes are straight from Vegan Cupcakes, but I did a slight addition to the chocolate cupcake recipe. Instead of extra vanilla or almond extract, I used raspberry extract. I also had some dried raspberries which I rehydrated with some sugar water, and I stirred those (minus the left over water) into the batter. The addition was subtle but pretty delicious.

More cupcake photos

On Soy Milk Prices

I wrote a post a little while ago about the Soy Scorecard and thought about it today when I was at Whole Foods. Why? Because while in the "dairy" aisle looking for Earth Balance sticks, I passed the soy milks and decided to do a price comparison.

Silk is now offering an organic soy milk again. As you may recall all of Silk's soy milks were organic until very recently. Now most of their soy milks are labeled as "natural," which (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) means diddly-squat.

Silk's organic soy milk was in the range of 2.89$ (I can't recall if it was .89 or .79 after the 2.)
Silk's "natural" soy milk was about 2.69$

To compare, Whole Foods 365 brand organic soy milk was 2.39$

It's almost incomprehensible to me why anybody would continue to buy Silk in light of this. I have drank Silk soy milk, and find it to taste exactly the same as the store brand soy milks I have drank (365 brand as well as whatever Shaw's sells). Store brands tend to carry vanilla, chocolate, plain and unsweetened soy milks, so they have variety as well.

While I have my issues with Whole Foods, I would much rather support them than Dean Foods. If voting with our wallets is all we can do, I encourage everybody to stop buying Silk.

Band-Aids

I just read an article from Cornucopia's blog about food safety, and it makes me wonder if things would be better if we could regulate against factory farming, which is what leads to increased bacterial infections of animals in the first place, instead of testing for bacteria after slaughter (or egg collection). In most cases, as far as I am aware, testing is up to the industries to perform which is not a very good regulatory procedure.

The FDA doesn't even have the authority to issue food recalls. They are all voluntary on the part of industry. This is why Nestle states that they:

voluntarily withdraw all of our retail Nestlé TOLL HOUSE refrigerated cookie dough from the marketplace. We announced the voluntary recall on Friday morning, June 19 [2009].

The US government does a great job of band-aid regulations. Instead of doing something proactive, like reducing factory farming which causes contamination of water supplies and produce (not to mention the quality of the air and the lives of people who work in slaughterhouses among many other factors) they simply allow the status quo to remain intact and ask for extra testing before products hit the shelves. I hope it will help but I'm sure that addressing the bigger problem would be much better for everyone.