Feeding the Hungry Ghost (14 page)

In a medium saucepan, heat the cooked fava beans over mediumhigh heat. Add the garlic, lentils, broth, cumin, and tomatoes. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally, until everything starts to come together and the red lentils become tender, about 12 minutes.

Stir and smoosh until you get the consistency you like. Some people like their ful totally creamy, others more on the beany side. Stir in the lemon juice and ½ cup parsley. (The ful can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 1 week; bring to room temperature just before serving.)

Top with your choice of garnishes, such as olive oil, tahini, parsley, tomatoes, and scallions.

GENTLE NUDGE
the
FOURTH: REDEFINING COMFORT

You look like you could be a chocolate person, but a little more interesting. Yeah? So let’s say your comfort food of choice is
turbofudge ice cream with salted toffee chunks. The coldness, the sweetness, the pop of saltiness, the clever interplay between the crunch of toffee and the coat-your-throat creaminess of the ice cream makes your eyes glaze with pleasure.

Or perhaps you’re more of a mac-and-cheese sort. Creamy gets you off, too, but it has to be savory — salty and fatty, with a warm sauce of cheese (or what passes for it) robing noodles that ain’t seen al dente in a while.

In both cases, these foods are so easy to eat, you barely have to chew. And you barely have to think, not if the manufacturers have done their job right. That salty/fatty/sweet flavor combination you love? Food companies love it, too, because it spikes your blood-sugar level and lights up all the pleasure receptors in your brain. This pretty light show comes with not-so-pretty consequences. It turns consumers into eating machines who don’t question what the food is doing to them or to the environment. It turns us into junkies. Junkies are not good decision makers. Or rather, they’re good at deciding all they want is more junk.

Within half an hour of eating your favorite indulgence, you hit comedown. Your blood sugar falls, along with your energy — and perhaps your self-image because you realize, congratulations, you’ve just loaded up on saturated fats, processed sugar, extra salt, and empty calories, plus a few chemical compounds you can’t pronounce, let alone comprehend. Where’s the comfort in that?

How food makes you feel is as important as how it tastes. Where it gets confusing is the emotional component — the “I want, I want, I want”s — having positive associations with food that promises comfort but lies to you. I hate liars.

How do you define comfort food? For me, it’s something nourishing and pleasurable, energizing when I’m feeling good,
propping me up when I’m needing support. That means something green and leafy; but serve a bowl of spinach to someone who’s being visited by the Crap Fairy, and in most cases, you will not be greeted warmly, despite all your good intentions.

While I usually want something spicy or crunchy like a twenty-ingredient curry, in times when I’m in need of comfort, I want something simple to make and simple to eat, gentle in spicing, soft in texture, tender, because I want to be treated tenderly.

I want the pleasure of something sweet but would like to reduce the degree to which we are enslaved by processed sugar and flour, your basic white devils. Being vegan, I am also at odds with dairy and eggs. I ask a lot.

The vegan factor complicates everything. Many vegan baked goods are — and I don’t want to alienate my own here — heavy. Or wet. Or both. My definitive zucchini bread recipe came about the way all my culinary successes do — off book, intuitively, in a kitchen fever. It is flavorful, flaxen, light, lemony, tender, and vegan, with eye-catching green zucchini flecks.

Zucchini bread multitasks, combining the sweet innocence of nursery food, the virtue of vegetables, and enough of a woo-hoo fun factor to make it all worthwhile.

Zucchini Bread

Enjoy with a cup of tea. Enjoy with someone you love. This can be yourself. Focus on the tea’s gentle, floral notes, the bread’s light and lemony sweetness. One small zucchini will do the trick. You’ll have the benefit of its goodness but barely know it’s there at work. Breathe. Feel at peace with the season, at peace with yourself. I’m not saying you have to sing “Kumbaya” or anything, but hey, if the spirit moves you.

¼ cup canola or coconut oil, plus more for oiling the pan

1 small zucchini, grated

2 tablespoons ground flaxseeds (also known as flax meal)

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

1½ cups spelt flour

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon aluminum-free baking powder

cup brown sugar

½ cup unsweetened soy milk

3 tablespoons agave nectar or maple syrup

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly oil a 9-x-5-inch loaf pan.

In a small bowl, stir together the zucchini, flaxseeds, and lemon zest.

In a large bowl, sift together the spelt flour, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and brown sugar.

Add the zucchini mixture to the flour mixture and toss, keeping things light — good advice for life in general.

In another small bowl, combine the soy milk and lemon juice. It will curdle; don’t fret. Stir in the ¼ cup oil and agave nectar.

Gently stir the wet ingredients into the zucchini-flour mixture, until just combined.

Pour into the prepared loaf pan. Bake for 45 minutes, or until bread is golden and puffed, and a tester inserted in the center comes away crumb-free and clean. You can also give it a gentle poke with a finger; it should spring back when baked through.

MOTHER’S DAT
for
DUMMIES

Spring is the season for regeneration, but it is also the season for she who generates. In April, we honor Mother Earth on Earth Day, then come May, we honor our own respective mothers on Mother’s Day. Gotta love ’em both because without the planet and without your mom, you wouldn’t be here.

Every year on Earth Day, we suddenly remember, oh, right, the earth is our home, where we’ve been getting room and board. For free. We feel guilty, so we throw parties, and they’re fabulous; but the presents are even better, with people launching new green initiatives every year. The thing is, whether your community starts a composting program or you make your own pledge to buy and eat local produce at least twice a week, the earth gets it. She doesn’t nag and say why haven’t you called. She’s the world’s greatest mom. You don’t need to take her out for brunch, just show some appreciation, make a little effort.

Jesus, it is said, made wine from water and fashioned loaves and fishes from thin air. The rest of us usually acquire foodstuffs by more conventional means. But for Earth Day, miracles are on the menu. You can help heal the planet, save money, and get a head start on dinner all in one go. I’ll even throw in a story.

One brisk spring morning, a stranger appears in a village (one of your classic plotlines, by the way). The stranger’s looking a little worse for wear and the village not much better. There’s been war, famine, poverty; in fact, all the horsemen of the apocalypse have ridden through, and it’s made the townsfolk a little less than friendly. They suggest the man move along.

“Right away,” he says, “but I’d like to stop for something to eat first.”

“Good luck,” they say. “You won’t be finding any food here.”

He smiles. “No problem. Got everything I need right here. I’m
in the mood for stone soup.” He builds a small fire, fills a beat-up pot with water, and drops in what he says is his magic soup stone.

Magic and soup — these are both appealing things to those suffering hardship, and within minutes, the whole ragtag village has assembled to watch. The man stirs the pot and smiles. “Love a good stone soup,” he says. “But, you know, what really makes it special is a bit of cabbage.”

“Is that right?” One of the villagers produced a sorry-looking head of it.

“Great,” the stranger says. He chops up the cabbage and adds it to the pot. “Thanks for helping me. You’ll have some soup with me when it’s ready, won’t you?”

The villager is thrilled, also hungry.

Another villager asks what else goes into stone soup.

“Carrots are lovely, perhaps an onion, a potato, and I always like to add some greens — just like the kind growing around here.”

Pretty soon the whole village has ponied up a vegetable or two to be chopped up and added to the pot with the magic soup stone. It all comes together to be a rich, life-sustaining soup the entire village can enjoy.

The moral is, we are capable of change, but only by working together. One twirly compact fluorescent bulb will not change the world. But if we all use them, they can help, and create a glow besides. So here is a stone soup for a Mother’s Day for the mother of all.

Earth Day Special:
Stone Soup (No Rocks Required), a.k.a. Vegetable Broth

Rather than tossing scraps and the odd bits of vegetables left over from cooking, throw them all in a bag — like a gallon-size plastic
one. Extra points if you use environmentally friendly reusable bags, available at most natural food stores.

Throw the bag in the freezer. Add scraps to the bag every time you chop fresh herbs, peel an onion, or tear up greens for a salad. Carrot, tomato, and potato peels, green bean tops and tails, stemmy bits of parsley and cilantro, cabbage cores, woody broccoli stems — everything goes in the bag. When it’s full and you’ve got an hour or so, it’s broth-making time.

Dump the veggie bits into a soup pot — two gallons or larger. Add four cups of water, a cup or two more if you’ve reached vegetable scrap mother lode. Put the lid on the pot, set the burner on high, and let the water come to a boil. Turn off the heat, leave the pot in place for half an hour (or longer), and you are done.

Meanwhile, the veggie bits and hot water will coalesce, producing gorgeous vegetable broth. Known as passive cooking, it may look like you’re doing nothing, but you’re making broth and saving energy, both yours and the electricity or gas necessary to heat the soup. Keeping the lid on means the heat doesn’t escape and does the work for you.

Let the mixture cool, then strain the broth through a sieve or colander into a waiting pot. Vegetable broth can be frozen until you’re ready to use it. Compost cooked and cooled scraps.

Taste varies based on whatever goes into the broth. However, it’s always better than the purchased stuff. There’s no salt unless/until you add it. And you never have to lay out another penny for prepared vegetable broth again.

It’s not a recipe to serve to guests, but you’ll make it a lot, I hope. Use it instead of water to cook whole grains — vegetable broth infuses them with both nutrients and flavor. Use it as the base for soups and stews, and as the base for a home-cooked Mother’s Day celebration.