Political Cooking: Wam Kat

Ok, this is going to be a German-centered book since the guy I'm talking about is Dutch and now lives in Germany, plus his book has only been published in German so far.

I hadn't heard of Wam Kat before I read an article about his new book "24 Rezepte zur kulinarischen Weltverbesserung" ("24 recipes to make the world a better place", dang German long words that can't be translated!) on Utopia.de.
A political vegetarian cookbook with a twist of biography in it? Sounded like my kind of book, but 25 € seemed a bit overpriced for it.

So I started reading about Wam Kat, who has been cooking for the masses for free at eco/environmental/AR gigs since the 70s, founded his own environmental network and was one of the first bloggers ever (Wikipedia says much more).

I also read some interviews and watched this video:


That convinced me to get the book... usually I wait until I've tried a bunch of recipes or have at least read a book from page to page, but I felt an urgent need to write about this book.

I'm not easy to surprise when it comes to cookbooks, and even though there's only 24 recipes in there (really? it feels like so many more!), I'm eager to try every single one of them. They are really inventive, and if not, have a lovely personal touch to them, and even though the book is called vegetarian 95% of the recipes are vegan. Where not, Wam suggests vegan alternatives- and I mean, for a change, real alternatives, not "leave out xy if you're vegan".

Plus, there's so much general info about the idea of Volksküche, left politics and just random chatter that's so much fun to read.

I'm going to test some recipes soon- and if you think your German is acceptable, give the book a try (after all, it's not the author's native language, either).

Did I mention Wam has the cutest Dutch accent ever?

News from Berlin and France

Apparently, the AR and vegan community in Continental Europe is gradually catching up with the UK and the US :)

This week, Attila Hildmann announced he's going to give vegan cooking classes in Berlin soon. Even if you're not in Germany, checking out his recipes (most are available in English) won't hurt. He first got me into vegan cooking in the good old days.

Furthermore, there's a new (one of the first?) French book called Cuisine vegan facile out there for only 3 € + postage, available from Droites des Animaux, though I'll yet have to check out if they ship abroad.

Not much cooking for me this week :( I hope things will return back to normal after Monday.

Vegan Fire and Spice

It's been almost two months since I received my copy of Vegan Fire and Spice, Robin Robertson's "new" book.
"New" because it's actually a reprint of an ovo-lacto cookbook she released a couple of years ago, though now it's all vegan and 25 new recipes have been added.

As I said when writing about the V-con, I mainly cook ethnic foods and try to be authentic. I will cook and eat more "traditional" Western foods, but to make me a happy foodie, give me Asian/Africa/Middle-Eastern/whatnot.
If you like this way of cooking, you will love Robin's books ( I also own Vegan Planet and Quick-Fix Vegetarian, which is actually all vegan).

As I love hot and spicy foods, I had to get this book, even though I had vowed not to buy any more cookbooks in 2008.

I don't regret it, not at all. Vegan Fire and Spice totally hit my foodie spot.

The book is divided in different chapters geographically, so there is:

• the Americas
• Mediterranean Europe
• The Middle East and Africa
• India
• Asia

It also has a lovely introduction with info about all sorts of different chillis, peppers and spices and some basic cooking information (think tempeh, seitan, tofu, vegetable broth).

Still, I realized I'm really spoiled when it comes to the terms "spicy" and "hot", due to Indian and Thai friends.
The recipes themselves are not searing hot, but I assume still unusual to the "standard"
Western palate.

Anyhow, here's a selection of what I made (and managed to snatch photos of). Enjoy!



Curried Mushrooms with rice, from the Indian section. This has shrooms, coconut milk, tomatoes and ginger. Need I say more? It was so easy and tasty. I had the leftovers with pasta in my bento the next day. This will become one of my standard recipes, I'm sure.



Another standard recipe of mine is harira. I have a friend with Morrocan heritage, so I know many variations of this traditional soup eaten to end the fasting month of ramadan. He approved of Robin's version and so did I. It's a very simple soup with chickpeas and red lentils, a nice staple-no-veg-at-home-dish, though totally unphotogenic.


Asian Fusion Noodles. As the title suggest, not authentic. I found it bland and didn't really like it, but friends and their kids did love it. I'm a total Asian food snob, sorry.

I also made the Hunan Fried Rice that everybody was raving about. That's why I followed the recipe very closely... and to be honest, it was ok, but I don't see what's so special or amazing about it. Maybe Asian restaurants in Europe make their fried rice totally different?
However, it was good in my bento the next day with some hot sauce in the birdie container. The other tier has steamed broccoli, tomato and some carrot strips.



This is the most versatile, tastierst and easiest recipe I made from the book so far.
Middle Eastern Chickpea soup with tomato salad and olives. I didn't amp up the heat in this recipe because it was 150% percent perfect as is.
This was so easy and made a lovely meal with some warm pita bread. I can imagine leaving out/ using less of the cayenne and feeding it to kids.

A day out

On Monday, I made the bulgur and chickpea patties from here and surprise, containing one of my favourite grains (where I live is a huge Turkish community, so people even grow bulgur trees [img]http://www.cosgan.de/images/kao/froehlich/d015.gif[/img] ) as well as my fave source of protein, I loved them.
The pictures is sort of neat... aftwards, I decided to add a bunch of baby spinach leaves and hummus and mash it all up (didn't take a picture of this). Sometimes I get this anarchic.

Yesterday, Eva and I went to Dortmund to finally visit the Westfalenpark. A friend had recommended it to me for a nice day out and I, being my urban nature-sceptical me, was a bit hesistant to go there.

However, after bought loads at the amazing Asian grocery this city has (you can by spices in bulk, they have a lot of different tofus and a billion funny veggies I haven't seen anywhere else), we took the subway to the park- and it was amazing!
We had a tiny (oh well...) picknick in a hut in the rose garden.

That were the remains... we had onigiri, chocolate muffins, marinated Japanese mushrooms, carrots, dates and thai coconut dumplings.
I was so stuffed, I can't imagine how we managed to walk the park for three hours afterwards!

Another exciting thing in the park was the German Cookbook Museum. They didn't have a lot of vegan-friendly recipes but we learned a lot about the role of women from 1600 to 1960 and saw some fancy gadgets from that time.



AND they had a Japanese garden... as everybody might already know, I'm nuts for Asian culture, especially Japanese. They also had a small shrine, but it was closed due to being heavily vandalized [img]http://www.cosgan.de/images/kao/traurig/a010.gif[/img] .




















They also had a sort of human hamster wheel... kinda hard to do with only two legs, but great fun!