Cherry Orange Cornmeal Cake, or How To Have Polenta All Day Son 

Dip the apples in the honey (I mean agave!), say a bracha loud and clear! 
L’Shana Tova U’metukah! Have a happy sweet New Year! 
   Whee! Another faux-year has gone by, chosen ones! Rosh Hashanah is such a good holiday. It’s like regular New Year’s, but better: 
1) You don’t have to make resolutions – in fact, you have 10 days to be as terrible as you want because on Yom Kippur you atone for that shit! (K that’s not how it really works but still.) 
2) You celebrate by eating apples and honey-substitute and not by drinking your face apart. 
3) You don’t have to worry about what huge (awful) party with lots and lots of (awful) people you’ll be invited to on New Year’s Eve, because you have big family dinners! Full of tons of food, wine, and yentas! So fun! 
For all of you gentiles, that’s all there is to know about Rosh Hashanah. Great right? You know you wanna convert.
     Last night, for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, my parents hosted the dinner for my grandparents and good family friends. Of course, I made 90% of the food. Every gathering is a chance to win people over with great vegan food, people!

                 The Menu

• Potato leek soup (recipe follows)
• Salad with mixed veggies
• Cauliflower-carrot mashed potatoes (recipe follows)
• Mango BBQ Beans (from Appetite For Reduction)
• Stewed okra and tempeh (recipe follows)
• Peas & pas’ (description follows)
• Broiled shaved Brussels sprouts 
• (Chicken for putzes)

                     Dessert

• Chocolate Yogurt Bundt Cake (from the PPK blog)
• Vanilla peanut butter cake balls (‘recipe’ follows)
• Lots of fruit

          Stewed Okra & Tempeh
     This one is like a gumbo? I guess? but I have no authority to say so. It’s just really yummy and really easy. I loved it, as did all of the guests.

• 1 big onion, diced small
  
• olive oil
  
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 1 bunch of celery (head of?), chopped
  
• 1t thyme, 1/4t red pepper flakes, 1/2t cayenne pepper
• 2 bay leaves
  
• 1 lb. okra, chopped 
  
• 1 can (16 oz., though 24 could work) diced tomatoes (I used fire-roasted)
  
• 1C+ water
  
• 1 package tempeh
  
• 2T soy sauce

Directions: 

1. Saute the onion, oil, and celery over medium heat for a few minutes.
2. Add the garlic, and saute until things start to brown a little. 
3. Add the spices, and more oil or water if things stick, and cook for a minute more
4. Add the can of tomatoes, then fill the can about halfway with water, and pour that in the pot.
5. Now, add the okra to the pot, along with the bay leaves. Add more water if necessary. 
6. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and let it all simmer, covered, for at least an hour. Keep checking to make sure things don’t stick/burn. I let it simmer all afternoon, on low heat, because why not.
7. In the meantime, make your tempeh. Crumble it in a small saucepan, and just barely cover it with water and the soy sauce. Bring to a boil, then cover (with room for steam), lower the heat to a low simmer, and let cook for 15-20 minutes, until it’s dry. You can saute it a little longer if you want the tempeh to brown. 
8. Add the tempeh to the big stew pot, and continue cooking everything until there’s no water. Then enjoy!

      As for the last two dishes – peas & pas’ and Brussels sprouts – I’ll just describe what to do. I can’t give a recipe for the former, because it’s a family dish, and I can’t for the latter because it’s too easy. So, lemme ‘splain. No, there is too much. Lemme sum up. Peas & pas’ = peas and pasta, said with an Italian-American accent. It’s the most garlicky food you’ll ever encounter. My mom makes this the best, because she’s the more Italian one of us. You Cuisinart-chop 2 big onions and like 15 cloves of garlic, literally. Then you cook it over the stove in a big pot with a metric shittonne of EB and olive oil. This is why my mom’s is better than mine, because I can’t bring myself to add the amounts of this stuff that she can. But that’s what makes it awesome. So you add like 1/4C EB and a 1/4C olive oil, and probably more, saute the minced onion and garlic mixture, add salt and pepper, and then mix in your shell pasta. Then you bake it in a casserole dish with a bag or two of frozen peas. It’s amazing. 
      For the best Brussels sprouts of your entire life, start by shaving the sprouts, like pounds of them. Or, to make it easier, buy them already shaved (Trader Joe’s sells bags of shaved ones). Take 2-3 bags, or pounds, of shaved ones, coat them with olive oil and salt and pepper (use your hands, get in there), and put them on a big baking sheet covered with parchment paper, in the oven at 375° for 20 minutes, or until the edges are browning and crispifying. So amazing. 

     Lastly, the desserts! I recommend that you make Isa’s Chocolate Yogurt Bundt Cake for any occasion, because it’s the best chocolate cake recipe I’ve come across. I had a slight aversion to bundt cakes for a while there (probably because it sounds like butt cake), so I’m really glad I tried this cake a few years back. It changed everything! No more butt cake phobia. 
     Also, I highly recommend making cake balls whenever you have leftover cake! Some of you might have seen the post where I made Rachel’s English Trifle, from ‘Friends’. I sensed some concern that I had to throw out so much good cake, custard, and icing due to the beef cube contamination. No way, guys! I would NEVER waste food! I tossed a very thin layer of whatever components touched the meat, and then I saved all that shit, yo! Duh! That cake was good otherwise! 

     So, back to cake balls. You take whatever leftover cake and icing you have, you mix it in a mixing bowl, you squish it into balls, and you coat the balls in melted chocolate! It’s the bomb! 
     I had at least one entire vanilla cake layer leftover from the Trifle of Doom, and the vanilla frosting. I got the frosting, added about 1/4C peanut butter, mixed like a mofo (HAHA MOFO) to work on my guns, man, and then squished in the cake. Do you want it laid out more easily?

1. Mixing bowl of cake and frosting
2. Melt chocolate
3. Squish cake & frosting into balls, cover with chocolate, have a stroke of genius and top with sea salt and raw sugar, place on a baking sheet covered with parchment or waxed paper, refrigerate for an hour or so, until needed.

     SO F-ING AMAZING. 
I love how much our guests were freaking out over them. They aren’t anything; they’re cake balls! So easy! But whatever, make them all the time and get lots of compliments. Many New Year! 

  In our short time in Madrid, we weren’t able to hit all the vegan spots I put on my list. (I was saving my food-tour kind of living for Austin.) Adding to the struggle was that we found at least two spots closed when they were supposed to be open. (I hate Uncle Siesta!) Luckily, we did get to eat at B13, an all-vegan bar the name of which I assume refers to how they’re even better than vitamin b12. Or that like b12, vegans need them. I doubt it’s that. It’s a cool, chill, punk-ish hole-in-the-wall with an unreliable but fun menu. The food was decent, nothing extraordinary, and at times hilarious, but it was just a treat to have an entirely vegan place, even if that place smelled of spilled beer and felt like it too. 

    We were very hungry after a day of walking and wandering, so we were happy when they brought a complimentary starter of bread and ‘salad’. Or were we? This was one of the most hilarious plates of food. In the middle of two pieces of bread was a mayonnaise-y clump of mayonnaise, as far as I could tell. Or potato salad, but the mayo outweighed the presence of potato and other vegetables. Yes, it was vegan (doesn’t look like it!), but still, there’s not much that’s appetizing about a big puddle of mayo, vegan or not. Not the most auspicious start, although it did taste okay in little bites. It’s hard to tell, but this was a huge portion. We tried to attack it at various points in the meal but it was just too much for our soft Western feet.

    Not having had enough beige, our first food order was calamari. Having fried calamari on the menu was a main reason I wanted to go to B13, because it used to be my faaavorite. And guess what that came with? More bread! 

The calamari was pretty good! It didn’t have a discernible fishy taste, which I think is a good move, and it was maybe more like very chewy onion rings, but it was one of the more enjoyable fried foods I’ve eaten. The hunk of bread we could have done without. Perhaps a salad (not of mayo) would have complemented it better.
   I was also lured to B13 because it actually has vegan Spanish omelette, the staple dish of potato-filled omelette. It’s so good and I really really wanted a vegan version. Guess what. None that day. They also were out of the croquettes, which sounded great. Arghaaanauts.   

    For our mains, we created two combo platters. The combo platter situation was quite something. You can pick one item from three different sections, which we did. So, three separate items, okay. One of ours came out as expected, like a full plate of food. But one was kind of funny in execution. For this unexpectedly funny one, we chose the sausages, the green peppers, and hummus. Like, it was three foods. On a plate. Just chilling. This is kind of weird, right? 

I mean, yes, here we have sausages, hummus, and peppers, which we did order, but they’re just, I don’t know, sitting there! All the components are just sitting there. I don’t know, it’s a weird plate! This also came with a basket of bread. It’s like a deconstructed plate of food or something. Weird. The peppers were really great, grilled until they were super soft. Although I may have just been excited about seeing a non-mayoed vegetable. No they were good. And the hummus was quite enjoyable, as almost all hummus is, despite it being the first food that needed bread but the 3rd dish that came with bread. 
    The other combo platter we made was the breaded seitan steak with salad and onion rings. Hrm. This seitan steak was…weird. It was super soft ‘seitan’, like you could tell it was maybe made with flour and not vital wheat gluten and not made correctly, and it was suuuuper sweet. It actually tasted like a maple syrup-covered pancake. But it was seitan. Husband couldn’t eat it. I tried. I did not fully succeed.  

At least this plate looks more like an actual plate of food, right? And that salad was so good. Well, it was average normal green salad with tomatoes and carrots, but I was so happy to see it after all this beige. The onion rings were decent but unnecessary. If I returned, I would combo platter the burger, which we didn’t try and I bet is really good just because of odds, the salad, and the peppers. 
     This is the point where our story gets very very sad. One of the best parts about B13 is that they have soy milkshakes! And milkshakes are one of the best foods out there! The availability of milkshakes was my #1 reason for wanting to go to B13. You’ve probably already guessed what happened: no milkshakes that day. Sadface. 
   They did have one last piece of cream cake. Or pie. I am not really sure what this was, but it had a wide layer of light thick sweet cream that was just really really good. The wondrous fluffy cream came on top of a spongy vanilla cake layer, and it was all topped with delicious caramel-ly crushed nuts. So yay for that. 

B13, MADRID, SPAIN
Water speed: Hooray for a carafe, though refills were slow. 
Service: Staff is mostly behind the bar, which we were near, so we could talk to them easily. 
Bathrooms: One or two very typical bar bathrooms. 
Food: Disappointing if you want great food (or anything you were jonesing for on the menu), but good if you just need somewhere vegan. 
Bonus: An all-vegan place in the middle of any city is pretty cool!