Sunday Blog 2 of 2: Celery Root & Mushroom Lasagna

I've been somewhat obsessed with celery root since the fiance and I took a trip to Montreal a few summers ago.  We had a celery root salad that I can still taste if I think hard enough about it.  I've been dying to play with it in the kitchen ever since, but I just now got around to it.

Celery root - it looks ugly, but is mighty tasty!

 I mused around for several recipes that sounded intriguing, and landed on this Celery Root & Mushroom Lasagna from Food & Wine magazine.  I've had it printed out for a month, and was determined to make it this weekend.

For those of you not familiar with Celery Root, our friends at Wikpedia share that:

Celeriac (Apium graveolens rapaceum) is also known as celery root, turnip-rooted celery^[1] or knob celery. It is a kind of celery, grown as a root vegetable for its large and bulbous hypocotyl rather than for its stem and leaves. The swollen hypocotyl is typically used when it is about 10–12 cm in diameter; about the size of a large potato. Unlike other root vegetables, which store a large amount of starch, celery root is only about 5-6% starch by weight.  Celeriac may be used raw or cooked. It has a tough, furrowed, outer surface which is usually sliced off before use because it is too rough to peel. Celeriac has a celery flavour, and is often used as a flavouring in soups and stews; it can also be used on its own, usually mashed, or used in casseroles, gratins and baked dishes. It can be roasted like a potato, giving it a crispy edge.

After procuring the necessary ingredients, I fully intended to make this three hour (yes, you read that correctly - three hour) recipe right when I got home from the grocery store.  But, after a much needed long nap and getting Blog #1's pie in the oven, I got a bit of a late start - around 8:00 p.m.

I love the fact that this recipe is so veggie heavy.  Pounds of mushrooms, leeks, celery root and shallots!  And, it was easy to make veg - I eliminated the prosciutto and used a vegetable broth (Pacific Natural Foods) in lieu of the chicken broth.   Also, a tip: rather than buying individual packages of herbs, you can just get a Poultry Blend, which will have just enough of the sage, rosemary and thyme (yes, I now have "Scarborough Fair" in my head).

Clockwise from bottom right: cremini mushrooms, leeks, celery root and soaked porcini mushrooms.

Now granted, despite all the produce.  healthy is not exactly how I'd describe it . . . we're talking pounds of cheese, lots of heavy cream.  But, have you ever tried to peel and chop a celery root?  It's like hacking through lumber.  I was literally sweating.   The chopping alone took about 20 minutes, so, if you find chopping tedious, this is not the recipe for you.

The aforementioned ragu.

However, if you're willing to put up with all the hacking, this recipe is tremendously rewarding.  The smell of the vegetable ragu was intoxicating - shallots and mushrooms and leeks and celery root in olive oil and butter, along with a bundle of fresh herbs . . . it was all I could do not to just eat it all while it was cooking.  It would make a terrific pasta sauce. 

After the ragu and cream sauce were done, and the lasgana noodles were boiled, the assembly began.  

The recipe called for fresh basil and fresh mozzarella, in addition to the ragu and cream sauce.

And here it is, after an hour in the oven.  It's 11:07 p.m. and I'm eating my first piece and wow, was it worth the wait!

Vegetarian Cheesesteak - Brought to You By My Friend Seitan

My co-workers were asking me about a vegetarian diet today, specifically how I get protein.  It's a common question when you tell people you're a vegetarian, I suppose. 

Now, I'd venture to guess that most people's first suggestion about protein for a vegetarian would be tofu.  One challenge I have is that I've got a soy allergy.  It's nothing life threatening, but I do get violently ill if I have too much of it.  So, that puts tofu and a number of "fake meats" out of the picture.

That said, I really don't feel protein deprived - I eat all kinds of beans, lentils and nuts (with the exception of walnuts and hazelnuts, which make me even more violently ill than soy).  Quinoa, farro, bulgur and wheatberries are also good sources of protein.  I still eat the occasional egg and dairy product.  And, I'm a big fan of Quorn - both in the grounds and tenders styles.   (I will share a post on the glories of Quorn sometime soon - the stuff is really amazing).

But, my #1 favorite vegetarian protein source is seitan.  With a single serving having around 25 grams of protein, it's a great way to work more protein into your diet if you're concerned you're not getting enough.  I avoided seitan for awhile, because I assumed that it was soy based.  In actuality, seitan is a form of wheat gluten.  From our friends at Wikipedia:

Wheat gluten, also called seitan (pronounced /ˈseɪtæn/), wheat meat, Mock Duck, gluten meat, or simply gluten, is a food made from the gluten of wheat. It is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch dissolves, leaving insoluble gluten as an elastic mass which is then cooked before being eaten.  Wheat gluten is an alternative to soybean-based meat substitutes such as tofu. Some types of wheat gluten have a chewy and/or stringy texture more like that of meat than most other substitutes. Wheat gluten is often used instead of meat in Asian, vegetarian, Buddhist, and macrobiotic cuisines. Simulated duck is a common use for wheat gluten.

I will note that Seitan is more challenging to find in a traditional grocery store than tofu and "fake meat."  In all the grocery stores I frequent in the DC area (and man, do I hit them all - I love the grocery store!), the only place I can ever find it is Whole Foods.  That said, it does have a decent shelf life, so I will often stock up on several packages at a time when we go there.

The brand I buy is WestSoy.  I prefer the strips to the cubed version.  You can sub it anywhere you'd use strips of meat - stir-frys, etc.  But, my #1 favorite way to use Seitan is in my Vegetarian Cheesesteak.

The Vegetarian Cheesesteak came to be last Fall.  At that point, I had been "off meat" since May.  And then football season started.  As a native Philadelphian and a die-hard Eagles fan, I ate my share of Whiz Wit in my day.  And, lo, when I was looking for something to eat during MNF (that's Monday Night Football for those of you not as football obsessed as me) I missed my cheesesteaks, but not enough to go back to actually eating beef.

Enter Seitan!  When you run a knife through it roughly, it resembles cheesesteak meat.  To make the sandwich above, I saute onions in olive oil until they are golden, then add the seitan.

Once the seitan is nicely browned, I season it with red pepper flakes and add sliced peppers (I used the leftover roasted yellow peppers from Sunday's enchiladas), spinach and cheese.  I use Daiya when I want a vegan version, but since we're out of both Daiya (need to make another run to Whole Foods, as I've also cleared out all my seitan), I used what we had in the house, which was some rennet free Cabot Monterey Jack cheese (Provolone is also great on this, and more traditional, but the other eater in my house may have eaten all my provolone . . .).   I serve the whole thing on a whole wheat sub roll carried by my local market.

The result is a satisfaction of my craving for a cheesesteak without that feeling of having swallowed a bag of lead.

Good sides for this bad boy are oven roasted potato fries (425 or 450, yukon golds cut into wedges, seasoned with salt and pepper, bake until browned) or sweet potato fries (I'm particularly fond of using Hannahs.)  Tonight, since I got home on the late side from yoga and it takes our oven about 37 years to heat up, I had a side of fresh fruit - blueberries and golden raspberries.

Vegetable Enchiladas

My soon to be in-laws were joining us for lunch today, so I decided it was time for a treat: vegetarian enchiladas.

When I attempt something new, I futz around on the internet until I find a recipe that looks interesting, and then I play with it a bit.   I decided to start with this Food Network Recipe, which was from Rachel Ray's $40 a Day show.  Rather than use pre-made green chile sauce, I decided to make my own green salsa recipe using Simply Recipe's Tomatillo Salsa Verde.  And, we decided we needed some "yellow rice" on the side, so I found this recipe from TammysRecipes.com.

How Do You Raja a Pepper?
Cooking 101: Read your recipe and read it again.  So, before I started cooking, I read the at the enchilada prep and it said to prepare the peppers "raja style."  Frankly, I had no clue what this meant.  Google was my friend again here - I found this helpful article that told me to roast them, sweat them, and cut them up.  Ah, easy enough.  Even though the recipe said only to roast the poblanos, I thought it would be nice to also roast our friends the bell peppers, which I thought would add a nice flavor element to the dish.

Behold, the beautiful poblanos and bell peppers before I stuck them under the broiler:

I won't lie - I am lousy at timing things.  My mother's adage about how long things should be cooked?  "Until it's done."  Hence I never got in the habit of looking at a clock.  But I can tell you I rotated them with tongs until each side was nice and charred.  I could have probably let them go longer, but I am impatient.


So, What is a Tomatillo?
If you've gone to Chipotle, or eaten salsa verde, you've had a tomatillo.  But, since I promised my future father-in-law I'd look it up, here it is, per Wikipedia:

The tomatillo (Physalis philadelphica) is a plant of the tomato family, related to the cape gooseberry, bearing small, spherical and green or green-purple fruit of the same name. Tomatillos, referred to as green tomato (Spanish: tomate verde) in Mexico, are a staple in Mexican cuisine.

The salsa recipe gave the option of roasting or boiling them, and I decided to roast for enhanced flavor.  I also cut it down to one serrano - it was fine and had plenty of kick.  I also left out the sugar - I'm trying to use as little refined sugar as possible when I cook (baking is another story :) ) and I didn't see the need for it.

Finished Product and My Vegetarian Tweaks

  I made the following additional switches & subs:

• For the enchiladas themselves, I swapped out mushrooms for black beans - we wanted the added protein and the color oomph.
• Also, I was going to use yukon potatoes per the original recipe, but, frankly, I got lazy and decided not to bother.  It was fine without them.  I (meaning Balducci's) also didn't have the hoja santa or espazote.
• For the rice, I used olive oil in lieu of butter, and vegetable broth in lieu of chicken broth.  We also used brown rice.  The tumeric got it nice and yellow - you honestly wouldn't know the difference.

I did use Monterey Jack cheese, but, if you wanted to go vegan, you could use a soy cheese or Daiya.  Personally, I'd recommend the Daiya - it does melt well and tastes more like cheese.

 Everyone had two servings, so I am considering this a success!