Crazy Mother Hubbard: What To Do With The World’s Largest Squash, Part 3 – Squashy Pumpkin Cinnamon Buns!

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! 

      Another fantastic restaurant in Berlin is Viasko, ostensibly a bar or pub depending on what country you live in (I will call them bubs now) but with really interesting and delicious – and all vegan – food. You’d assume such bar food would be fried shit and what nots, but the menu is a tad nicer and more upscale than the usual bar fare of fried shit and what nots (or just plain gross salads for vegans). I’ve heard you have to go for the buffet brunch (buffet brunch is HUGE in Berlin – we’ll look at one this weekend), but I can recommend going for a really fun dinner with the ambiance of a chill bub. We sat in the basement, which was dimly lit with candles among the all wooden plank furniture. It had a very pirate ship vibe, which is totally fitting because today is apparently Talk Like a Pirate day, the celebration of which will probably get you smacked. 

      I immediately felt fond of Viasko because printed inside the menus is this incredible Martin Luther King, Jr. quote:

     Seriously how lovely is that. Ugh he was amazing. 
         Anyway, if I am not mistaken, this was our very first dinner in Berlin, so we ordered way too much food. Not that that’s really a reason. We were just hungry. I freely over-order in most situations. We started with appetizers of the mixed salad with tempeh and the jalapeno cheese sticks, so my favorite kind of dish ever (salad + tempeh) and the most revolting sounding thing ever (cheese sticks). Both were great! 

I loved this salad! I wish the lettuce and veggies were cut smaller; it helps me look less gross when I eat if stuff isn’t going to get all over my face. The fried tempeh nuggets were outstanding though. Fried tempeh nuggets are pretty hard to mess up; I’m pretty sure they are like falafel in that there is a very very limited quality range (never bad, always good, can’t really break the ceiling) but oh man, these were fantastic! The perfect addition to any salad and much better than croutons. 

          For the jalapeno cheese sticks, I guess we were expecting the cheesy sticks themselves to be spicy, but instead they surrounded a pepper. I’m sure they were intended to be spicy and the pepper was just there as well, but we were like, oh you just put the pepper on the plate separately, okay. They were interesting. I’m sure if you like fried cheese sticks, then you would love these, but they’re not my thing. Husband says they were good, so yeah I’m the worst person to review stuff like this. Try them and see, I guess. 

      Of course we ordered the homemade gnocchi with asparagus (spargel!) because of the spargel. It was delicious! Homemade gnocchi is the best. This dish was in a cashew-pumpkinseed-ramson (wild garlic) pesto with white and green spargel, cherry tomatoes, and arugula. The raw arugula should have been dialed back a little in favor of more spargel, but it was still great. 

     I was told to get the gyro plate (by either a person or the internet) and I’m so glad I did! Look at that stuff! Anything with bread and hummus is a winner in my book already, but this added olives, some kind of decent kraut (Germany), cucumbers and tomatoes, and of course the delicious soy gyro meat. Granted, this should have come with a flatbread of some sort so you could turn all the components into an actual handheld gyro, but whatever, it was really yummy AND fellow diners got to see me try to make this all handheld anyway (all over the face). 

So, I can definitely recommend Viasko for a really fun pub dinner. The atmosphere was great, the service was friendly if slow (we were in a basement), and the food was really fun and overall great. Also, it seemed very affordable. I’d love to go back for more fried tempeh cubes and to try its buffet brunch. 

VIASKO, BERLIN
Water speed: Slow because we were in the basement.
Bathrooms: These bathrooms were standard bar/pub style (kind of gross) but decent for their ilk. The best part is that they are absolutely COVERED with stickers and graffiti for vegan-friendly bands, blogs, everything! I need stickers for my blog so I can put them all over bub bathrooms! 
Service: Slow.
Food: Great! 
Bonus: Great pirate atmosphere.