Mothers Day Feast: A Feast for Mothers

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! 

    When traveling, your best bet for finding good food is to listen to locals, letting them dictate which path your food tourism follows. In Berlin, we were lucky to have two friends there who planned an epic buffet brunch for us all at Kopps. Buffet brunch is like the big hip thing to do in Berlin, and I can’t imagine any other place’s offerings being as awesome as the all-vegan, never-ending spread at Kopps. The restaurant itself featured modern, Ikea-inspired decor (which I loved), and really great enormous picture windows (which let the sun bake my back and add a level of intrigue/sweat to the whole thing). It just seemed like such a chic place, you’d never guess it was an all-vegan establishment – there was no wicker furniture or patchouli smells (joking). Also, it was freaking packed! Reservations are required!

     We quickly learned just why this place was so crowded. The food was ridiculous! There was very little labeling so I can’t say oh try this and try this. JUST EAT EVERYTHING. And then get four more plates. And then get dessert. Seriously, I don’t think anything was not delicious. (Except those little orange and green discs in the top picture. I don’t know what I thought they were going to be, but they were fancy pats of butter. Hahahahahahaha. Don’t just eat that plain. Oh man gross. Blechhh.) 

      Look at all this hot food and cold salads and stuff! It went on forever! There were pancakes and potato things and then all these amazing bean and grain salads. Oh now I remember something that was gross. See those little white cups of custard or something? I assumed (NEVER ASSUME) that it was going to be a sweet vanilla custard or cream of some sort – meaning, dessert. It was not. It was peppery and gross. 

I cannot wait to go back and continue to eat everything in sight! What a spectacular place! Why aren’t there fantastic brunch buffets in other cities? Does London even do brunch? I need to open a Kopps copy here. Have you been? Do you remember what any specific things were or is it all just a blur of deliciousness like it is for me? 

KOPPS, BERLIN
Water speed: Decent, but the waiters were freaking super busy with that crowd.
Bathrooms: Very nice!
Food: Never-ending, delicious, just insane. 
Bonus: They had fresh juices!