Vegan « (y)our food choices™

Raw beet salad. Crunchy, sweet, and healthy, perfect for holiday gatherings.

It’s December 1st today and only thirty days remain in the year before it’s time to get back in the gym and back on that diet. No more excuses and no more vices will be your motto before you know it. So, you can either go balls to the wall and eat, drink, be merry and then feel hung over for the next thirty days or you can take a few small steps now to slowly get back on the wagon, a little ahead of schedule, while at the same time enjoying your holidays.

In the past we’ve been the balls to the wall types, eating and drinking like every night in December was our last night on earth. Two, even three bottles of wine a night, along with full dinners including appetizers and dessert and then, to top the night off, we finished with a Scotch. If we wanted to be really bad, we’d have another one. While the hangovers were horrendous, we always seemed to be ready to go again the next night and the night after that, until the magic date–December 31–when suddenly, at midnight, we would give up every bad habit and get back into the world of healthy living.

This last couple of weeks we have taken a few small steps to get back into shape. Running a couple days a week, along with completing the outdoor parcourse (fitness trail) around the polo fields, has been a nice way to reincorporate fitness into our routine. Although we are still enjoying a martini or two when we do go out, we’re drinking less this year than in years past. Our days of excess at any expense seem to be over and our lives of moderation and comfort seem to have finally arrived. Could it be, now that we’re both in our forties, we feel a need to behave like grown ups? NO!

Hopefully, even with the parties and dinners out, we’ll continue to run and exercise. We still have a lot of celebratory toasts to make and plenty of rich holiday fare to eat and that means getting up off our butts and moving. All those pies, hams, cookies and cheese balls will be with us far to long into the new year if we don’t work them off now. And hell, we want to look and feel good out there on January 1st when we join the rest of our breathless neighbors out on the Golden Gate Park horse trails for our resolution run.

We’re talking about incorporating more raw vegan dishes into our culinary repertoire next year, along with fruit and vegetable juices, a greater diversity of whole grains and lots and lots of hearty greens. We’re not vegetarians and we don’t advocate vegetarian or vegan diets as a permanent way of life, but we appreciate the wisdom in modest meat consumption. So, we’re going to play with high protein vegetable dishes in the new year. We’ll share them with you here and invite you to share your New Year food choices.

So even though the rest of December’s blog posts will feature a lot of cookies, chocolates, cakes, and maybe even a pie, remember that secretly we are working out and eating a somewhat healthy diet this season … with cocktails!

We took this recipe from epicurious.com. Even though the recipe is great the way it is, we’re looking forward to experimenting with different vinegars and oils.

Raw Beet Salad

2 tablespoons Sherry wine vinegar

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

5 tablespoons safflower oil

3 large raw beets, peeled, coarsely grated — using a food processor is quickest and easiest!

Whisk vinegar and mustard in large bowl. Gradually whisk in oil, then mix in beets. Season with salt and pepper.

All the makings of gazpacho.

Two days in San Francisco – is that really all we can get out of you? You didn’t give us any time to prepare and enjoy the first truly summery soup and ice cream we made especially for your visit. Rude! It was all too brief, but I guess we’ll just have to enjoy our cold soup and accompanying creamy frozen concoction with our old reliable friend – Fog. It’s not that we don’t enjoy Fog, but all he does is hang around, sometimes letting a few rays of blue sky through, only to envelop the skies again in his moody grey cloak. Not that we’re complaining or anything like that. No, don’t worry about us. We’ll just sit in our little kitchen listening to the mood music on KFOG. Oh listen, it’s Annie Lenox singing “Here comes the rain…again,” while the rest of the country is dancing to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” Yeah, well, our CA gals are in sweatshirts, not bikinis, thank you very much! (Sorry for the outburst.)

Getting ready to blend

Summer, we know you said you’d be back soon, but you’re unreliable. You show up when you want and leave without saying good-bye. How can that be any good for us? We know you’ve hosted a pool party for the rest of the country, setting high temperature records everywhere while we have to stay in the cold comfort of San Francisco. Again, we’re not complaining. But really, Summer, couldn’t you have hung around at least one more night? Just long enough to enjoy dinner with its menu of gazpacho with grilled cheese sandwiches and bourbon peach ice cream? Is that really too much to ask? We could have drank all night and danced until the wee hours of morning, but no, you had to leave.

All along, the weather people have been telling us you’d be around at least a few weeks. And just when the bounty of this year’s tomato harvest is coming to us in our CSA box. We really thought this would last until at least the end of September, but now you’ve just upped and split on us again. That’s no way to live. So, Summer, if you’re out there: please come back for another visit. Even with all the complaining we do while you’re here, we really do enjoy you’re company at least for 3-4 days in a row. Oh, by the way Summer, since we miss your heat so much we’ve added a roasted jalapeño pepper to the gazpacho, a lingering zippy sensation to signify how we wished you had stayed around just a little longer.

XOXO

Jason and Steve

The finished product with grilled cheese.

Gazpacho Soup

2 sweet peppers

½ onion

½ cup of milk (or enough to cover the onion)

4 tomatoes

2 small cucumbers

3 garlic cloves

¼ – ½ cup olive oil

small handful of basil leaves

2 slices bread

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar (or more to taste)

Tabasco – to taste

salt & pepper – to taste

Roast and skin the peppers. Mince onion and soak in milk for about a half an hour. Peel tomato skins and rough chop. Peel cucumber and rough chop. Chop garlic into large pieces, add to sauté pan with olive oil and let sear for a few minutes, don’t brown, allow to cool. Tear the bread and soak in water for about half an hour.

Drain the milk from the onions, add onions to a blender. Squeeze the water from the bread and the bread to the blender. Add the tomatoes, cucumbers, chopped roasted peppers, basil, sherry vinegar, Tabasco, salt, pepper and olive oil to the blender. Puree until smooth. Chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours, or overnight, before serving.

Bourbon Peach Ice Cream

2 cups cream

2 cups whole milk

2 cinnamon sticks

6 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

pinch of salt

2 tablespoons reserved bourbon from peaches (or from the bottle)

½ – 1 cup chopped bourbon peaches (or fresh peaches)

Add the cream and milk to a medium saucepan with cinnamon sticks over medium heat to warm. Leave the milk on the back of the stove with the heat off for about 20-30 minutes. Reheat the milk and cream before continuing.

In a separate pan add the egg yolks, sugar and salt and whisk together. Slowly add the milk, about ¼ to ½ cup at a time to temper the egg yolks. After you have added about 2 cups milk pour the mixture back in the saucepan over medium low heat and cook until slightly thick. At this point you are making a light custard. You don’t want the custard to be too thick, nor do you want to scramble the eggs. Once the custard is made add the bourbon and allow to cool to room temperature. Refrigerate for 4-6 hours or overnight. Add to your ice cream maker and process for 25-30 minutes, or according to your ice cream machine. Add the chopped bourbon peaches to the ice cream in the last 5 minutes.

Freezer for another two hours and enjoy on a hot summer day, or a cold winter one (like most July days in San Francisco).

Bourbon Peaches

We preserved some peaches in Bulliett bourbon by skinning, removing the pit, and cutting the peaches in half. Pouring enough bourbon over the peaches to cover. You can add some ginger pieces to the jar, if you wish. Refrigerate overnight or up to two months. Use the bourbon in cocktails, desert, ice cream, etc.