ghost town to tarifa.

Zahara de los Atunes was no more populated the next morning. The same dudes who yesterday had been outside hammering and sawing and sanding and otherwise preparing hotels and restaurants for being open for the season were still hammering and sawing and etc. The same one hotel that had been open for beer and potato salad before dinner yesterday was also apparently open for coffee and cigarettes this morning. I made an executive decision and decided executively that we would forego that shit and instead I walked to the Dia for a little bread and butter and blueberry jam.

Which was kind of like breakfast but on the way out of town we decided that coffee really would be a good idea after all and stopped back at the place we'd had dinner at last night, which wasn't open but they let us in and made us coffee anyway. This is how you run a restaurant btw.

Then a brief look at the beach, after which the idea was to drive to a mall near Estepona on the way to the airport in Málaga, Our flight wasn't til 9pm, Nelson desperately needed clo-thes, and I myself desperately needed a new pair of jeans that didn't look retarded (which, amazingly, I found, and bought), but around Tarifa we started getting dangerously hungry so it seemed wise to stop and do something about it. Plus it seemed like we might find something vegetarian since Tarifa is known as one of the windsurfing capitals of the world, and as we all know, surfers love vegetables (?).

That was the thinking anyway, and it proved to be totally correct. Not only that, but Tarifa was totally charming and exotic, a bit like a safe-feeling Tangier. Well, being in Tarifa put Tangier on our minds anyway, since that's where we took the boat to Tangier from last year, but the two were somehow very similar in layout and feel. Very difficult to have any idea where you were going, but here you didn't feel like being lost was a total liability. Anyway, very cute and we were all "why have we not considered coming here before."

TripAdvisor steered us toward Chilimosa, a name which sounds like a crappy suburban Mexican place in Wisconsin, but turned out to be the right kind of hippie vegetarian joint, with really solid falafel and a curry that reminded me of my beloved Himalaya in Atlanta. Plus the right kind of no Wifi, a sign saying "no we don't have Wifi, please talk to to each other."

Then back in the car, to the mall, we split up to do shopping, I knocked mine out in like 15 minujos and then stopped at Beher for one last chorizo sandwich and a cup of coffee. Then the airport. Then a very turbulent flight and the bumpiest landing I've had in years (people screaming "I'm going to die", etc). Then a cab ride. Then a chat with Johnny D. Then a brief sleep. Then a long train ride. Then attempted recovery and reintegration.
 

heading south.

Above: view from the back yard in Ronda. Below: driving to Zahara de los Atunes, stopping along the way for a pee at a place called Venta de las Acacias, where I had a tapa of lomo con Pedro Ximenez cream sauce for €1.50. It's a crazy place, apparently only closed for 3 hours per day (and here's what most people eat there, glad I didn't know about it).

Then we somehow narrowly missed a giant storm and finally made it to Zahara de los Atunes to find that well we were the only people there. They're pretty much closed from November to April. I didn't even think to look because our restaurant's Facebook page kept saying "Open now" when I'd look at it, and heck, we'd had quite a hard time getting a room.

Yes, that was because none of the hotels were open either. Well two were. Ours, and one where you could drink a beer and play some cards. But in a town of 100 restaurants, maybe 10 were open: two pizza places, five seafood-centric tapas bars, probably something else, and then the place that I braved a serious Death Mope to get to. Arrocería Zokarrá.

They were open, we were the only people there, they even asked us what kind of music we wanted to hear. The food was about the best we could possibly have done that night I think: that's a tomato magically filled with burrata over quinoa, and a really tasty rice with payoyo, roasted vegetables and fried artichokes. I accidentally ordered nasi goreng in a pineapple. But everything tasted great and the hosts couldn't have been nicer.

tuesday morning.

Above: rain. Below: rain. Below that: "Oh hey, you have to have to taste the garbanzos at this place, they're the best, the ones with spinach and cumin....mmmmm", etc.

Below that: a very intense goat cheese on a disc of eggplant with possibly membrillo on top and balsamico drizzle, and one of Las Caballerias' two chickpea dishes, this is callos con garbanzos, the one full of tripe and kidneys and liver and who knows what else. Nelson even tasted it, and really wished she hadn't. Not pictured, acelgas con garbanzos, the one we were supposed to taste with spinach and cumin.

Below that: pure Nelson nostalgia at Pizzeria Michelangelo, where she's been more times than she can count, and everyone knows her as "La Holandesa". She said absolutely nothing has changed there in 15 years, and yes, I believe it. The waiter/owner knew her order before she did: pizza margherita with capers. It was a really good little pizza (€5.50).

Below that: a Seville orange I plucked from a tree, because they're everywhere and you wonder why no one is eating them. I tasted this gingerly as if it was going to shrivel my tongue off, but it just tasted like an orange.

nope, still winter.

fakeout.

chorizone.

And a really great cup of coffee (€1). After arriving to a foodless house last night, save for half a baguette we bought at the airport, a bag of dried apricots and some flaked coconut, bitches woke up ready to bite things today.

So this was breakfast/lunch today. Below: filetito con mojo picante (€1); chorizo masita (€1); padron peppers with sea salt (€3.50); chorizo being bitten the fuck out of by me and croquetas di setas (€5); ahhhhh Spain you so goddamn cheap.

champion sounds.

Damn you Kristy(!) Turner. Another really edible thing that just sounds ridiculous as titled, "Chickpea Omelets."

They're not fucking omelets. They're, eh....cheela. And that is not a sausage patty. Etc, And yet....damn you, Kristy(!)...if I'd made the patties a little smaller, this would've been a perfect breakfast plate that no meat eater I know wouldn't like. The above is non-vegan because I, eh, cooked them in butter, and that's Greek yogurt in the center of the plate. But it could be!

This recipe keeps evolving: lately I've been using fresh green beans and unsauteed iceberg lettuce and the result is very different but also good.

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besan ka cheela (chickpea flour, cabbage, onion and scallion patties).
1 cup chickpea flour
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup + maybe 1 or 2 tbsp water

2 cups pointed cabbage (ugh, what is the real name of this?), cut into non-stringy shapes
OR 2 cups shredded iceberg lettuce
1/2 onion
1 cup scallion, sliced
salt to taste

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, stir in 1/2 cup of the water and keep going until it's mostly smooth. I had to add a little more than a tbsp of water here to get to a pourable pancake batter consistency.

Saute cabbage or lettuce and onion in a little olive oil for 5 minutes or so, or until cabbage (or lettuce) is mostly wilted, then add scallions for a couple minutes. Make sure to salt the contents of the pan once while sauteeing. Then throw those vegetables in with the batter, stir to coat everything.

Heat up your saute pan, oil or butter it, throw in about 3/4 cup batter for each patty. Here's what I think the key step was other than salting both the batter and the sauteed vegetables: you throw it in the pan, then cover immediately and cook for 3 minutes. Remove cover and flip, replace cover, cook for 2 more minutes, serve immediately.

That's it! This amount serves 2 or 3.

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close.

OK it's gluten-free, and nearly vegan. Aaaaaand, most importantly.......it tastes great. It's Anna Jones' cauliflower pizza crust, plus a very quick and gazpacho-y tomato sauce, plus some roasted fennel and onion, plus Kristy! Turner's sunflower sausage and cashew cheese. Yes I know that all sounds shitty as hell, just think of it as a pizza with lots of nutzzzzzzzz.

I have no idea what the solution for this lack of appetizing taxonomy is. You could try calling things a fennel/sunflower seed salsa and a cashew pesto if that helps, even though what they taste like is Italian sausage and some kind of umami cheese food product. I think that's my official first and last use of the word umami, I didn't like it at all.

By far the least shitty thing about all of this is that there's zero of that industrial fake meat/cheese taste anywhere and the whole thing is light as a feather and very much gives you the feeling of "I'm eating pizza!", minus one thing: the stretchiness of mozzarella. But these nut/seed pastes are just delicious and texturally pleasing and and and oh yeah easy to make. The sunflower seed business especially is a little miracle of alchemy, it doesn't taste like any one of the ingredients except fennel seed, it just feels right.

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cauliflower crust. 
olive oil
100g finely ground almonds
100g oats
1 medium head of cauliflower
1 tsp dried oregano
2 large eggs, beaten
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 200°C. Line a large baking tray with baking paper and drizzle some oil over it. Process the oats in the food processor briefly and transfer to a large mixing bowl. Chop the cauliflower into small florets and process in the food processor until you have a rice-like texture. Tip the cauliflower into the bowl with the oats and add the ground almonds and dried oregano. Give everything a good stir and season with salt and pepper.

Make a well in the middle of the cauliflower mixture and pour in the eggs. Mix until everything comes together. The dough will feel wet and won't be stretchy like regular pizza dough.
Place the dough onto the oiled baking tray and flatten it out until it's about 1/2 cm thick and slightly thicker around the edges. Place into the oven and bake for 20 minutes until it just starts to color. Remove and top.


sunflower-fennel seed salsa.
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced

2 cups raw shelled sunflower seeds
1/4 cup chopped sun-dried tomatoes (dried/reconstituted rather than jarred in oil if you can)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp liquid smoke
1 tsp dried sage
1 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
salt and pepper to taste

Saute onion for 3 minutes, add garlic, saute for 1 minute. Remove from heat. Add all other items to a food processor and process until some of the sunflower seeds are broken down and the liquid ingredients are combined. Add the onion and garlic and pulse everything until it's the texture of ground beef, or slightly finer or coarser depending on your preference. Salt to taste.


cashew pesto blanco.
1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked in warm water for at least 1 hour and drained, water reserved
5–6 tbsp. reserved soaking water
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp white miso
1/2 tsp garlic powder

Combine and process to a cheese-like consistency. Refrigerate.

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tohu thoke.

Well this was totally worth doing. My adaptation to follow, spoiler alert: kaffir lime and good peanuts required.

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primary colors.

This is to hpu, yes, which is not a ty po, Terrill Soules wherever you are. It's also called Burmese tofu or tohu thoke or Shan tofu, but while room temperature to hpu is certainly a super interesting substance, like a cross between polenta and a Spanish tortilla, it's absolutely nothing like tofu.

This is the recipe I used to get where I am so far, which I trusted because it's suspiciously identical to the Dutch one from Anna Jones' cookbook that I tried to use, but, like so much of the cooking I'm doing lately, the process is so unfamiliar (for me) that I had to find an English version to be certain that these were really the steps.

Anyway. More when I figure out what to do with it. Guess something like this is one option, or this...but maybe the first thing to do is try the New York Times' recipe for tohu thoke.

In other news, found a pretty good thing to do with discarded, unloved mandarin oranges: basically oranges, vinegar, sugar, a big pile of ginger, dates, walnuts, cloves, cumin, and a few other things, cooked for a long time.

anudder whorl.

I am cooking in another world. Elzer has gone gluten-free, and dairy-free, and sugar-free, and she was already meat-free and egg-free and fish-free. You might think that that means there's nothing left, but no, there are things left, you've just never eaten most of them in the forms we're turning them into. Today she made crackers out of seeds. I'm making tofu out of chickpea flour. Yogurt made from coconut cream is doing it's thing in the fridge. Nothing is as it seems. Up is down. Black is white.

I'm trying to quote Eddie Dane in Miller's Crossing, but I don't think I'm doing a very good job (Editor's note:

Eddie Dane: Very smart. What were you doing at the club, talking things over with Leo?
Tom Reagan: Don't think so hard, Eddie. You might sprain something.
Eddie Dane: You are so goddamn smart. Except you ain't. I get you, smart guy. I know what you are. Straight as a corkscrew. Mr. Inside-Outski, like some goddamn Bolshevik picking up his orders from Yegg Central. You think you're so goddamn smart. You join up with Johnny Caspar, you bump Bernie Bernbaum. Up is down. Black is white. Well, I think you're half smart. I think you were straight with your frail, I think you were queer with Johnny Caspar... and I think you'd sooner join a ladies' league than gun a guy down. Then I hear from these two geniuses they never even saw this rub-out take place.
Frankie: Boss said to have him do it. He didn't say nothing about...
Eddie Dane: Shut up! Or maybe you still got too many teeth. Everyone is so goddamn smart. Well, we'll go out to Miller's Crossing... and we'll see who's smart.)

The most surprising thing is that we're actually eating pretty well, lots of little things that feel healthy and taste good. Pictured above: sweet potato pao de queijo, without cheese, so they should really be called something else, but they were a totally viable breakfast food if you didn't eat 6 of them like I did (recipe here, though I left out the herbs and doubled the amount of water). And below is a nice oatmeal variation from Anna Jones, whose cookbook just seems to keep getting better the more weird stuff you try and even the obvious things end up being nice variations, like this: whole oats, oat milk, tahini, coconut yogurt, chia seed, date syrup, grated red apple, coconut flakes.

restjes, deel 3982.

This turned out way better than expected, light and with an almost eggy texture, so before I forget.

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what to do with leftover rice.
2 cups leftover cooked rice
4 tbsp leftover plain yogurt or homemade tzatziki
3 tbsp chickpea flour
pinch ground coriander
pinch ground ginger
pinch ground turmeric
pinch cumin seeds
possibly 1 or 2 tbsp water, probably depends on your rice
a good bit of salt
coconut oil for frying
pinch nigella seeds and/or black sesame seeds

So, I just put the rice in the food processor and zhoomed it up, possibly having first added the tzatziki to make it easier to process. Then added everything but the black sesame seeds and processed it for 30 seconds or so. Then decided it needed some water but not too much, you're going for a pancake batter that will spread out a little when it hits a hot pan but will also flip without falling apart.  After you throw some batter in the pan, throw a pinch of black sesame seeds on the side facing up. When the little air bubble holes appear after 2 or 3 minutes, flip and hope for the best.

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overkillt.

So the other night My First Internet Friend went for a 23km hike through the frozen tundra, a hike whose endpoint was literally right around the corner from here, and so I made a kind of stupidly complicated appetizer with which to welcome her to this fair city.

This is a chickpea flour pancake with tamarind syrup (loosely based on this) topped with a dry potato curry (closely based on this), mint pea mash (not visible in photo), pudina pachadi or "green chutney" (here), Anna Jones' roasted maple-lime coconut, and some little pink cubes of Turkish pickled turnip.

I was trying to make something that tasted like bhel puri but wasn't cold, and yes, this did that. Sure would be nice if there was a slightly easier way to get that feeling though, maybe it would be as simple as skipping the potatoes and peas, just making the pancakes, two chutneys, toasted coconut and some store-bought Rice Krispies.

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new curry 2.

Yeah, no posts, I know. What can I make. I imagine there'll be a Winter Photo Roundup Jamboree at some point, but for now what-a we have-a to offer is some continuing documentation of Papyrus Problems 'round the globe.

And.......segue........also some continuing terse documentation of recent Indian food successes. I thought that the Anna Jones curry from last month was pretty special, and while I'm pretty sure it still is, this kind of even simpler and rounder version from Kristy Turner's vegan cookbook that I can't even type the name of because it offends my tender sensibilities was really almost every bit as good. I could imagine making both of them for a dinner party kind of thing if you could decide which one would more resiliently handle swapping out the main ingredient since they're both sweet potato curries. I kind of think this one would be good no matter what the main ingredient was.

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sweet potato and red lentil curry with green peas and spinach.

1 medium or large red onion, chopped
1 tbsp coconut oil

4 garlic cloves
one 1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled
one 2-inch piece fresh turmeric, peeled

1 tbsp sambal
1 tbsp curry powder, I used Chan's Surinamese masala
1½ tsp garam masala
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

good pinch smoked salt

2 or 3 cups low-sodium vegetable broth
3 cups peeled and chopped sweet potatoes (about 2 medium)
1 cup red lentils
1 cup coconut milk
1 tsp to 1 tbsp Dutch appelstroop (mm, kind of like molasses or treacle, start with 1 tsp)

1½ cups frozen green peas
2 handfuls fresh spinach, leaves roughly chopped

1 teaspoon black salt (kala namak) or sea salt (didn't have this)

Melt the coconut oil in a pretty big pot and throw the onion in. "Meanwhile", process the garlic, ginger, and turmeric and after the onion has browned a bit throw this stuff in too. Don't burn it, if you start to run out of liquid/oil you can either add more coconut oil, or toss some coconut milk in, or some of the broth you'll be using in a minute.

After say 5 minutes of cooking the onion/paste mixture, throw in the sambal, curry powder, garam masala, turmeric, black pepper and smoked salt, cook for maybe 3 minutes. Then add the broth, sweet potatoes, and lentils. Cook for maybe 20-25 minutes, until your potatoes are almost done. Throw in the coconut milk and appelstroop, cook for 5 minutes. Taste for seasoning. Add the peas, cook for 5 minutes, make sure everything's still hot and the frozen peas have become unfrozen, then throw in the spinach and serve over the starch of your choice. Serves, mwahhh 4 at the most.

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