Zucchini Cakes

My college roommate La and I used to make these great hashed brown zucchini cakes. We especially loved eating them at passover (subbing matzah flour for the bread crumbs). La even adapted the recipe into a sort of pizza crust. Unfortunately, that recipe used 6 T Parmesan cheese to bind the cakes together and to provide a bit more flavor.

So when I saw this recipe for zucchini cakes adapted by one of my favorite bloggers, I knew I needed to veganize it. The eggs in Kim's recipe are mainly for binding, so I knew pureed silken tofu would do a great job.

Zucchini Cakes

2 cups grated zucchini
salt for draining the zucchini
1 cup bread crumbs (I like panko)
1/4 cup pureed or mashed silken tofu
1 1/2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon vegenaise (optional)
flour (optional)
oil for frying

Salt the zucchini heavily and let rest in a colander for half an hour to drain. Rinse the salt off the zucchini and squeeze out as much liquid as possible.

Meanwhile, combine bread crumbs and Old Bay seasoning in a medium bowl. In another bowl, mash the silken tofu with a fork (or puree) and add vegenaise and mustard. The vegenaise adds a nice amount of flavor to the recipe, but you can leave it out to cut down on the fat.

Combine the bread crumb mixture and the zucchini and mix thoroughly. Add tofu mixture and combine well. You should be able to form the zucchini mixture into cakes with your hands. If the mixture is too wet and won't clump together, add flour by the tablespoonful until it reaches the desired texture. Form zucchini cakes about the size of your palm.

Fry the patties in oil over medium heat until browned on both sides (about 4 minutes a side). Serve with tartar sauce.

(For vegan tartar sauce, just mix vegenaise with a bit of dill relish.)




In gardening news, I have volunteer corn. My father tried to plant corn in Texas for years and couldn't get it to grow. And here two weeds I let get out of hand turn out to be corn. Go figure!

Happy Birthday, Eeyore!

Eeyore of Liberty

Every year, Austinites meet up in Pease Park for Eeyore's Birthday Party. The festival started in the '60s as a spring party for UT students, and over the years it has grown into a large festival benefitting area non-profits. Every year's theme is the same: the birthday party for dreary Eeyore-who-lost-his-tail from the Winnie the Pooh books. Besides the Eeyore of Liberty and a donkey petting zoo, none of the festival activities have much to do with that story. But I think the carefree attitude of the festival captures the spirit of the Pooh books pretty well.

Thousands of people gather for drum circles, dancing, body painting, hula hooping, and costume contests. This was my first year at the festival and it was, well, relaxing. It's not often you see adults having so much fun.


May Pole


Hula hooping


Parachutes!


This was the drum circle early in the day when only about fifty people were drumming and a handful were dancing. By the afternoon, it was so crowded with dancers and drummers I couldn't get close enough to get a picture.


Only in Austin do the bikes grow on trees!

Look!

There's an itty bitty tomato growing on my tomato plant! About a week after I planted these tomatoes, a herd of evil spidermites attacked them. Spidermites are so tiny, they're hard to see. I could tell something was wrong because the leaves were turning black. So I grabbed a piece of white paper, held it under the leaves, and shook my tomatoes. Sure enough, tiny red dots fell onto the paper.

Spidermites hate the damp. So for the next week or so, I watered the underside of the leaves on my tomato plants. I was able to save 4 of the 6 plants. And the largest one is blooming and producing tiny tomatoes now. I've had such bad garden luck so far, I'm tempted to eat the green tomatoes now just so I can be certain I'll harvest something from the garden this year.

New Baby Muffins!

Dewey and I are an uncle and aunt as of late last night! So I've gone into cooking mode. Here is a Very Berry Muffin from Yellow Rose Recipes by Joanna Vaught. I used strawberries and blackberries. We'll bring these and a nice dinner for our nephew's mom and dad to enjoy tonight.

I've really liked everything I've tried from this cookbook. It's all very comforting and Texasy (Texasish? Texany? reminiscent of Texas?). If you get a chance, try the taco salad or biscuits and gravy.

Tex Mex leftovers

Dewey and I eat Tex Mex pretty often. And this is how the leftovers usually end up the next day. Last night, Dewey and I ate tacos with Spanish rice, black beans, red bell peppers, and onions. Today, I made a bowl full of Spanish rice, black beans, and wilted spinach with garlic.

Often, I'll make the rice for this by replacing some of the water with leftover salsa. (Sometimes I feel like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride running through the aisles of the grocery store, ripping packages of buns apart. Salsa and tortilla chips NEVER run out at the same time. I always have too much of one or the other.)

I topped the whole thing with Crystal's queso. This is THE vegan queso recipe. The recipe is offline temporarily because Crystal and her partner will be mass producing it for sale. Congratulations, guys!

Garden update: The kale was eaten by SOMETHING. It is no more. The carrots turned out the be grass. I planted tomatoes, and half of them have already succumbed to spider mites. Good thing I'm not counting on this garden to provide all my food.

My first garden porn

This is my first time ever starting a garden from seeds. Growing up, we always had a garden going in the backyard, and I did my share of weeding, watering, and harvesting (especially harvesting). But this is my first time ever planting seeds in the soil and holding my breath until they pop up. Just as I was getting ready to replant my kale and carrot seeds this weekend, I spotted some green! I have seedlings! I think.

Itty bitty kale!

And a carrot! Or maybe grass. Who knows. But did you see the kale?

And as Dewey and I were moving bricks to build some walls for my compost heap, we disturbed a gecko nest. (For scale, this is one of the holes in the brick.) The gecko ran off, but here are four tiny gecko eggs, three of them already hatched.

Quick, Easy Dinner

Broccoli soup with garlic bread. This took maybe 15 minutes of hands on time and a bit of waiting for things to boil. A quick, healthy weeknight dinner.*

Dewey likes to watch "Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares." He's been wanting to try a recipe for broccoli soup from one of the episodes. The recipe: boil broccoli in salted water, puree with a bit of the boiling water, and serve with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of pepper.

*Dewey insists on adding "easy-peasy lemon-squeezy". There is no lemon in this recipe.