Recently in Veeegs Category

When we got knee-deep in the nitty gritty of planning how we were going to pull off our recent wedding catering gig, we quickly realized the difference between making some big-ass salads and nourishing a nuptial celebration: a proper wedding cake. Not being known for our sweet teeth, or sweet knives, we had to decide whether to shop out such an intimidating item or tackle it head-on. We wavered.

In the end, the Hot Knives wedding team's 'stay-legit' subcommittee realized what a shitty proposition it was to rely on a San Diego vegan baker to seal the matrimonial deal for us. So we got to researching and everyone involved liked the idea of cute little cakettes instead of a full fledged wedding cake. So we dug up a solid vegan cupcake recipe and added a few Hot Knives twists in flavor and our own shiv of decoration. The cake is vegan, the frosting's vegan. Both are sugary as hell and cute as a button of peyote. This recipe makes a dozen; we made 100. Wedding guests chewed on the cuties, while the bride and groom shoved an intense multi-tiered cupcake masterpiece. Full debriefing on that menu later this week.

1 cup soy milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 tsp almond extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 350°F and line a 12-cupped muffin pan with foil cupcake liners.

2. First you are going to actually "curdle" your soymilk, to make "buttermilk." In a mixing bowl gently mix the soymilk and vinegar, and set aside for three to five minutes. After those mintes are up, vigourously beat the mixture with a whisk until your bowl resembles a bubble bath--frothy and thick. Slowly add the oil in a steady stream while beating, and then add the extract.

3. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, and salt. If you don't own a sifter, no biggie: simply put two colanders together and pour powder stuffs in increments, making jerky motions to evenly sift. Then add these sifted dry ingredients to the wet ingrediants and gently fold together until no lumps remain.

4. Pour batter into liners, filling 3/4 of the way. Bake 18 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Transfer to a cooling rack and let cool completely. When cool frost and decorate.

1 cup non-hydrogenated shortening
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted if clumpy
1/4 cup plain soy milk
1 1/2 tsp tangerine oil
12 nasturtium flowers
1/8 cup candied ginger

1. Place a 1-cup stick of vegetable shortening in a mixing bowl and place over the oven for 5 minutes to let soften. Then add sugar and beat with a whisk. If the shortening is still too cold, use a potato masher to workt he mixture into a paste, then whip out your whip and mix until smooth.

2. Slowly add soymilk, whisking until creamy and even. Add tangerine oil in 1⁄2 tsp increments and continue whisking. Frosting should turn a subtle beige-orange color and taste like fresh tangerine.

3. Pick nasturtium leaves into bite-size, manageable sections. Chop candied ginger into 1-centimeter cubes.

4. Use a pastry bag or a steady handed spatula to frost cool cupcakes and top each with 2 nasturtium leaves and about 5 or 6 ginger cubes.

Beverage: Green Flash Imperial IPA
Soundtrack: The Raveonettes' "Chain Gang of Love"

While last summer was all about textured soy marinated in Miller High Life, this June grilling season has started off a little more au natural. We wanted to come up with some sort of vegan equivalent to that street vendor staple bell pepper and grilled onion smothered hot dogs wrapped in bacon. It all started with a simple search term: "vegetarian sausage casings."

To our chagrin, that turned up little more than crazed vegan Internet gossip trying to track down such a product. (Apparently, such casings do exist, but they're only available to commercial buyers in industrial numbers and the idea of storing 10,000 vegetarian sausage casings was not appealing.) Instead we came up with another idea: use a grilled chile for the casing! And it worked, sort of. For a meaty filling, we mixed up a slow beer-infused onion mushroom and chorizo-spiced stuffing, held together by the magic of risotto. Though starchy for sure, the veggie rice mixture makes for a pillowy hot dog replacement. Experiments to find the perfect stuffing are on-going.

2 Tbs. olive oil
1 white onion
1/2 cup crimini mushrooms
1 cup Arborio rice
1 Tbs. cumin seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 cup beer (pale ale)
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
2 canned tomatoes, diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1/2 lbs. oyster mushrooms
1/2 Tbs. smoked salt
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 red onion
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. balsamic vinegar

4 green chiles, Anaheim or Fresno
4 large hot dug buns

1. In a sauce pan, add olive oil and put on medium heat. Finely chop onion and slice mushrooms and add to the oil to sauté, stirring, until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the arboro rice and stir for a few minutes to toast.

2. Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees.

3. While toasting rice, add spices starting with the cumin seeds and fennel seeds so they toast as well. Stir well and continue adding coriander, paprika and cayenne. Now add the beer and continue stirring every 30 seconds. Once beer has completely been absorbed, slowly add vegetable stock in 1/4-cup increments as it absorbs, while stirring. Near the end, add diced canned tomatoes. This should take about 10 minutes.

4. While waiting for risotto to fully cook, roast off your oyster mushrooms. Tear large ones into bite-sized pieces and set them on a pan sprayed lightly with oil. Season with smoked salt and black pepper and roast in oven until deflated and slightly crispy on edges, about 15 minutes.

5. Once risotto rice is sticky and nearly overcooked, remove from heat. In a large bowl, combine roasted oyster mushrooms, chopped red onion, soy sauce and vinegar. Test consistency by making burger-shaped patties. They should hold together well when you toss in the air (careful).

6. Now, fire-roast your chiles to remove the skin. Make an ice bath with 3 cups of water and some ice. Cut off pepper top, remove seeds gently and place pepper on a stovetop burner on high flame. Turn with tongs every minute to evenly black each side, then dunk the charred pepper in ice bath. Wait one minute and then scrape off skin with your fingers. Repeat and your pepper casings are done!

7. Finish by stuffing chiles with mushroom-meat risotto. To ensure they won't be too big for a hot dog bun, slice off part of the chile: Make a lengthwise cut to on side, stopping short of the point so the pepper is one long rectangle with a tip. Now put your knife down about 1-cm inside the pepper and slice again, removing a 1-cm section, making the pepper smaller. Take a full handful of risotto stuffing, then put half back. With the remaining portion, form a long cylinder in your hands, then plop into the pepper and curl it back into its original shape. Pat gently until the mixture sticks to pepper skin and you have an enclosed package.

8. Spray generously with oil before putting on the grill. Keep sliced fold from opening by gently position with tongs. Grill about 5-7 minutes or until grill marks are satisfactory. Place in a warm bun, garnish with desired fixings (we liked grain mustard and vegan mayo).

Beverage: Dale's Pale Ale
Soundtrack: Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup

After a long hiatus from grains and greens we felt the need to clean out our closets and get back on the fiber horse. The heat of the summer and the impending peril of innumerable events, social obligations, and overtime often keep us from hearty meals. When time is of the essence, sometimes a snack attack is the only source of sustenance solace...

Here's a little ditty to help slow down the clock and regain focus on proper meal time pleasure. We'd been eyeing a bag of Farro, an ancient heirloom grain that used to feed the Legionnaires, and had just procured an unholy (both in cost and quantity) amount of sweet pea sprouts. The grain salad plus green salad vision was almost instantaneous; the sweet crunchiness of the sprouts floating atop a chewy pile of unhulled grain. We rounded out the fiber bomb with some stovetop grilled squash grown by a favorite farmer dusted with some Raz Al Hanout recently procured from Morocco.

1 cup Farro
4 cups water
½ cup hulled sunflower seeds
2 large shallots, diced
2 Tbs. Extra Virgin Olive oil
1 Tsp. sea salt
1 Tbs. ground pepper

1. Bring water to a oil in a pot and add Farro. Cook approximately 15 minutes, or until the grain doesn't seem dry in the middle: not too soft, but tender.

2. In a cast iron skillet (or a nonstick pan) toast the shallots and the sunflower seeds dry (no oil) on medium heat for about 13 minutes. Stir frequently. When the shallots are beginning to brown, and a sticky film is starting to accumulate in the pan, add the salt and one Tbs. of oil.

3. When the Farro is slightly teder, drain and cool immediately in a collander with cold water and/or ice. Now, add the Farro to the seeds and shallots and cook for another 5 minutes until the grains are slightly crunchy. Finish with the remaining oil and the pepper and remove from heat

1 Red Pepper
1 Yellow Summer Squash
4 Scallions
1 Tsp Raz Al Hanout
1 Tsp. Smoked Paprika
1 Tbs. Extra Virgin Olive Oil

4. Portion the red peppers by slicing off the face of each side of the vegetable. Rub with olive oil and smoked paprika

5. Slice the squash similarly, by laying it on its side and making long ¼" slices. Rub with olive oil and Raz al Hanout.

6. Trim off the outermost layer of the scallions, ans snip their greens short 1" from the top.
Using a grill or a nonstick pan, sear veggies on both sized with high heat and a little oil. All you need do is color each side of each veggie---they'll finish cooking by the time you eat them.

1 cup pea sprouts
Juice of one Lemon
1 Tbs. Saba
2 Tbs. Extra Virgin Olive Oil

7. Wash the pea sprouts in cold water.

8. Combine the Saba and lemon juice in a bowl and whisk in the olive oil in a steady stream.

9. Toss the salad with the vinaigrette.

10. Top a portion of the cooked Farro with a hefty pinch of pea sprouts, and flank with grilled veggies and the hot sauce of your choice.

Beverage: Los Abbey's Inferno Ale
Soundtrack: Brian Eno's Baby's On Fire

If this feels like a dejavu, don't bother pinching yourself: you have seen this dish before, allbeit in different forms. Most recently, we came up with a take where tomato confit balanced delicately on a sliver of expertly carved hearts of palm. But the recipe you're looking at here is what happens when a great idea for a dish meets reality and you're forced to scramble to fix a problem. In this case the problem being that those cute little caprese spears we dreamt up for our San Diego wedding catering gig simply refused to stay in people's hands. (Not to mention our original stab at the recipe meant throwing away half of a can of hearts of palm, and when you're dealing in bulk, this sucks. ) Good thing we found this out a week before the wedding, and planned accordingly so that insanely nice tuxedoes were spared from Hot Knives goo.

To make the dish stick, we baked off a baguette of crostini rounds to be the dish's base. To act as a glue, we plopped down a puree that saved us from having to toss the extra hearts of palm. And then on top came the actual meat of hearts of palm and confit with garnish and a drizzle. From the clean plates, this dish was one of the biggest hits, but more on that later this week when we debrief the entire 14-course wedding menu. (Photo by Aubrey)

Caprese Bites w/ hearts of palm and tomato confit

(Makes about 30)

1 baguette (day old)
1 1/2 cups olive oil
2 tsp. sea salt
2 cups grape tomatoes
2-3 shallots
1 can hearts of palm
2 sprigs dill
4 sprigs basil
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic, peeled
fresh black pepper to taste

1. Prepare your tomato confit (this can be done as far as one day in advance). Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees. Wash and dump the grape tomatoes into a deep baking dish or bread pan. Add enough olive oil that the tomatoes are mostly submerged, about one cup. Thinly slice shallots, placing them over the tomatoes with salt and pepper. Roast in oven for roughly 30 minutes or until tomatoes are translucent.

2. Make the crostini: turn down the oven to 300 degrees and slice baguette into thin rounds, just less than 1-inch thick. (Most proper baguettes will yield about 30 slices.) Dab each round quickly with drops of olive oil and sea salt. Then bake on a sheet pan for 15 minutes, or until slightly brown.

3. To cut hearts of palm, go through the can and slice each heart of palm lengthwise so that you have two long semi-circle shaped rods. Then remove and set aside center piece to create a half-pipe. Cut each long half-pipe into two or three squares. This will be the section that gets splayed out on the crostini.

4. Recycle all the hearts of palm remnants into a blender.

5. Strain what you can of the oil from the tomato confit, gently so as not to burst the delicate tomatoes. Add that oil to the blender and pulse until creamy with dill and half the basil. Chiffonade the other half for garnish.

5. In a small saucepan put the balsamic vinegar on high heat and reduce by half. Once reduced, press garlic into pot and remove from heat, letting it cool for about one hour.

6. Construct crostini bites. Lay out crostini bread. Next comes a dollop of herbed hearts of palm puree the size of your ring finger. Follow it with a hearts of palm square. Then place a smaller dollop of puree, the size of your pinky on the square, to act as glue. Finally plop down two of the tomatoes. Finish with a careful drop of balsamic reduction and chiffonaded basil.

Beverage: Brasserie Dupont's Foret
Soundtrack: Stereolab's Space Age Bachelor Pad

During the early days of the Edo period, Soba Noodles became a solid solution to a thiamine blight that was destroying the Japanese masses. During the same period Dutch beer halls sprung up like so much buckwheat and led to the advent of those light crispy lagers that suck everywhere but at an Izakaya...

This missile in the barrage of plates that we executed last weekend in the southernmost southland was requested by the Bride and Groom. Going along with our globetrotting lineup, we had to oblige a shout out to the highly aesthetic glory of Japanese Cuisine. Rather than fiddle with tofu or fake fish, we went the route of the Soba noodle salad; a simple but platonic filler of the belly and a dish whose historic rise in popularity mirrors that of our favorite beverage: Beer.

1 pack soba noodles (10-12 oz.)
1/2 bulb ginger
4 scallions
1 Tbs. black sesame seeds
1 Tbs. white sesame seeds
1-2 sheets Nori seaweed
1/2 tsp. smoked salt
4 japanese cucumbers

1/4 cup grape seed oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tsp. sesame oil
1 Tbs. rice wine vinegar
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. cracked peppercorns

1. Make dressing: In a large bowl mix soy sauce, grape seed oil sesame oil, sugar and black peppercorns. Pulse with handheld mixer until smooth and creamy. Add 1 cup chopped green onion tips. Let sit at least 12 hours.

2. Bring a large pot of water with a dab of sesame oil to boil and add the noodles. As soon as water returns to boil, check noodles and add a cup more of a water to break the boil. Stir and watch. Let cook about 5-10 minutes, remove and rinse with cool water. Set Aside.

3. Cut vegetables: Japanese cucumbers into slim half moons, scallions into long bias cuts, peeled ginger into thin matchsticks.

4. Toast sesame seeds, colors can be mixed. If your seaweed is raw add it to the sesame seeds with a touch of sesame oil and smoked salt. (If it is already smoked or toasted, which is hard to find, add it at the end for garnish.)

5. Toss the cool noodles with some grape seed oil and sesame oil to keep from sticking. Gradually add the veggies and then the dressing, mixing with tongs. Finally add sesame seeds and sea weed, saving some for garnish.

Beverage: Hitachino Nest Beer White Ale
Soundtrack: Soh Daiko-Taiko Drum Ensemble

Maybe the marital feast we're catering next weekend, and feverishly planning for right now, has us pondering how food can bring people together. Or maybe it's the Spice Girls' "2 Become 1" on repeat. Whatever the reason, we loved giving Israeli couscous a Moroccan kick, because we needed a sauce with some heat that would slick the bloated caviar-like balls of wheat with some oily heat. We chose a mild harissa of assorted red chiles. We added toasted cumin seeds ourselves for the real kick and served it as a room temperature salad. The stuff also works under a tagine, or alongside grilled vegetables. Just make sure to let the stuff sit for an hour or two to let the flavors "marry." Har-har.

8 oz. Israeli couscous
1 Tbs. vegan margarine
1 large red bell pepper
2 shallots
1 scallion
1/8 cup flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup harissa (mildly spicy)
2 Tbs. olive oil
3 Tbs. whole cumin seeds
Salt and black pepper

1. Bring water in a medium-sized pot to a near-boil over high heat. Lightly salt the water, just a pinch of sea salt, and add margarine. Right before the water hits a rolling boil, add couscous and turn down to low heat. Gently stir once or twice to keep from sticking. Let cook for 5-8 minutes or until couscous balls are perfectly plump and not at all crunchy. Remove, drain and shock with cold water.

2. Finely dice your vegetables. Slice the red bell pepper into quarters length-wise and remove seeds. Then slice quarters into long thin slivers, turn and dice into confetti. Dice your peeled shallots into the same small shape. Wash, pat dry, and chop flat-leaf parsley like you would for tabouleh. Add all of this to a large mixing bowl, saving a couple pinches of parsley for garnish, and mix with the couscous.

3. Dress the couscous with your harissa sauce and some additional olive oil (adjust to get a slick and smooth consistency, depending on how thick your harissa is).

4. The clincher: in a small sauté pan, toast the cumin seeds for about 2 or 3 minutes or until fragrant and slightly more brown. Add the seeds to the mixture and stir well. Season to taste. Let sit for at least an hour to marry. Serve at a room temperature.

Beverage: Unibroue's Maudite
Soundtrack: Primal Scream's "Little Death"

We're back on the wedding catering warpath kiddies. Next weekend the Hot Knives crew is shipping down to San Diego for a marathon baking and grilling session for what will, hopefully, be an epic reception. The menu is done and most of the kinks are worked out, but we've been slow to post the recipes. Now, here comes the deluge. First up, possibly the greatest raw vegan edible we've concocted this year: a cold pad thai salad made not of fatty coconut flesh like some vegan "chefs" do, but out of all the veggie trappings that make pad thai krinkley and fun, dressed in a tamarind-coconut milk. We're still playing with the proportions, but you get the idea.

(Serves 4)

Coco-Tamarind Dressing
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 lemongrass stalk
5 kaffir lime leaves or the zest of two limes
1 Tamarind pod
2 tsp. rice wine vinegar
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/8 cup grapeseed oil

Raw Pad Thai
4 or 5 large carrots
1 quarter of a purple cabbage
4 radishes
1/2 cup bean sprouts
1/2 cup raw peanuts
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
4 scallions

1. In a small sauce pan, heat the coconut milk on medium heat. Beat the lemongrass against a hard clean surface until the outer laers start to split (this brings out more flavor int he infusion) and cut into manageable pieces. Place lemongrass into saucepan. Add kaffir lime. Let this heat until a rolling boil, then turn down to a simmer. Let cook for 15 minutes, then let cool.

2. Using your fingers,break open the tamarind pod and dig out each goop coated seed. Take a paring knife and carefully make an insicion that breaks through the goop membrane to the nut of the tamarind; then squeeze out the seed. Add tamarind pulp to the coconut milk mixture, blend or pulse together until smooth.

3. Combine the tamarind pulp, soy sauce and rice wine vinegar and chilled coconut milk in a blender or robot coupe and pulse until well combined. While blending, add the grapeseed oil in a steady stream to make an emulsion. Blend for an additional minute after all the oil is in the mixture and your sauce is done.

4. Roughly peel your carrots. Using a mandolin, or your vegetable peeler, slice carrots into thin ribbons. Collect in a large mixing bowl. Slice your purple cabbage in the same fashion. (Veggies should look like the garnish on a typical pad thai dish). Slice your radishes into pickle-sized chips. Add bean sprouts.

5. In a small sauté pan, toast your raw peanuts until slightly brown, about 5 minutes on medium heat. Let cool and chop roughly. Reserve 2 Tbs. for garnish and add rest to the salad.

6. Pluck individual cilantro leaves from their stem and add, as well as the scallions, roughly chopped.

7. Toss the pad thai with tongs, dress and stir until coated evenly. Chill in the fridge for at least one hour. Plate and dust with additional peanuts.

Beverage: Echigo Stout
Soundtrack: Acid Mother's Temple, "Interplanetary Love"

Cold drink of water, such a sweet surprise, put a smile to your face 10-miles wide… Whoawwwww!

Tonight we buckled down with some fresh groceries and even fresher ideas for the May wedding we’re catering for our friends Matt and Laura. It’s the first training session of many. And the results were kickin’. So kicking in fact that we’re humming that Warrant song. No wedding metaphor intended!

All night, swing it!

Cherry Tarts

(Makes 25)

1/2 lbs. dehydrated cherries
1 cup Ruby port
2 Tbs. raspberry jam
25 vegan baby tart shells
25 sprigs fresh mint
1 small cantaloupe, halved

1. First, whet your appetite with a swig of port. Pour the rest on top of your cherries in a medium saucepan, along with raspberry jam, and let cook uncovered for about 20 minutes. Stir well.

2. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees.

3. Lay out tart shells on a baking sheet. Fill each about three-fourths full and stick in oven for 15-18 minutes.

4. Top each cup with a small melon bowl, by scooping a ripe melon with a teaspoon, like you are scooping ice cream. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

Beverage: Unibrou Quelque Chose
Soundtrack: Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”

Sometimes kooky fusion combos are better, more soulful, when improvised on the spot rather than pre-meditated. This one was borne from us being too tired, lazy, brain-dead and starving on a weekday night to be pithy or political with our pairings.

Falatkas are, you guessed it, a cross between falafel and latkes. Shredded potato and zucchini are veggier than the dry-mouth grains and smushy garbanzos, but toasted cumin just happens to make anything taste like pure falafel. Rather than mess with a condiment that embodied the already weird pairing — like an apple-tsaziki sauce — we slopped together a red-pear mustard that surprised even us. We served these crispy critters on a bed of Israeli couscous and dry mixed greens with a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, but if you have the resources you could also pop ‘em in a pita. Or a bagel? See, we always go too far.

Falafel-ish Latkes

(Serves two)

2 small zucchini
2 small potatoes
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 Tbs. fresh cumin seeds
1/2 cup rye bread crumbs, fine (optional)
1/2 white onion
2 cups grapeseed oil (canola works)

1. Wash zucchini and potatoes. Shred both with the finest side of a grater to achieve matchstick pieces of each, but keep the two separate. Place grated zucchini in a colander and sprinkle with kosher salt. Let sit for about five minutes (this will bring out moisture and make the zuke super easy to compress).

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine potatoes and zucchini and cumin. Add bread crumbs if desired for extra bulk — it is not needed, however, as the zucchini makes it very workable patties as is.

3. Form mixture into small patties and set on a plate.

4. Heat frying oil in a small wok or medium sized frying pan. Once very hot (drop a cumin seed in, it should immediately sizzle) fry one or two patties at a time. Pat dry and cool on paper towels before serving.

Pear Mustard

(Makes 2/3 cup)

1 red pear, mostly ripe
2 shallots
1/4 cup Pedro Jiminez vinegar, or sherry vinegar
2 Tbs. sugar
1 Tbs. Dijon
sea salt and black pepper to taste

1.Partly peel your pear and slice into small chunks. Peel and dice your shallots. Add both to small saucepan and then place on medium heat.

2. Once they start to release liquids, about 5 or 6 minutes, add the vinegar and let reduce by half. Add sugar, salt and pepper and continue cooking on medium heat for another 5 minutes before tossing in mustard to finish. Stir and serve slightly chunky.

Beverage: Flying Dog’s Barley wine-style ale
Soundtrack: Kinski’s “Alpine Static”

Forget to make that reservation at the new organic small-plate izikaya cocktail raw food bistro for Valentine’s Day? Get stuck with a 4:45 seating time? You know, there’s no shame in cooking, for one another. Like Adam and Eve sharing the apple tarte tatin of knowledge, or whatever.

For this V-Day — and the two-year anniversary of this blog! — we wanted to dip our dirty fingers into a dessert menu by doing something both savory and sweet, romantic and rowdy, something indulgent enough that we would make it for sweeties as a St. V present (naked) but something simple enough that you could it eat by yourself, (also naked). We set upon a wacky take on “sticky rice”: sticky rice with sweet, tempura-fried baby beets. The recipe is a little time consuming, not a lot, so you can spend most of your time cuddling.

Sticky Sweet Baby Fried Beets

(Serves 2)

2-3 Red baby beets
1 cup tempura flour
3 dried vanilla beans (or 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract, if you must)
1/2 cup white sushi rice
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 tsp. cardamom
3 Tbs. sugar
2 pinches salt
2 cups vegetable oil

1. Bring a small saucepan of water to boil for the beets. Chop their leaves off at the stem and snip off any tails so that the beet as close to heart shaped as possible.

2. Once water is boiling, drop them in for about 8 minutes or until slightly tender to a fork jab. Remove and cool under water or in an ice bath.

3. Skin the beets by running the edge of a spoon gently along the rough skin. The beets will naturally look a little like hearts, embellish by cutting a “V” in the flat top. Then place beet down on cutting board and make 4 or 5 slices, about 1 centimeter thick. If needed, chip away to make top curved and heart-like.

4. Fix sticky rice. We used a super easy microwave method repped by a Thai convenience website. Start by soaking your rice in warm water for at least 10 minutes. Then simply cover bowl with a plate and nuke for 2 1/2 minutes. Remove, stir, and repeat. Rice should be translucent and, um, sticky. But fully cooked. Let sit while you prepare the coconut milk.

5. Bring c-milk to medium temp in a small sauté pan. Add cardamom and stir well. Once nearing a boil remove from heat and add sugar and salt. Stir. Mix 3/4 cup of the coconut milk into sticky rice and stir thoroughly, setting aside the rest for the tempura mixture and a sauce garnish.

6. Mix tempura batter: add tempura flour to large mixing bowl, and scoop out vanilla bean using a spoon. (If using vanilla extract wait until you add your liquid, then add extract.) Combine 1/2 cup of the coconut milk to make a thick slurry of a batter. Vanilla beans should be visible.

7. Bring about 2 cups of canola oil up to high, fryin’ temperature in a small or medium wok — high heat for close to ten minutes. Once dangerously hot, batter the baby beets, letting excess batter drip off, and quickly fry them, about 1-2 minutes each. Remove, blot gently and rest on paper towels. Sprinkle with a pinch of sugar while still hot.

8. Garnish using two sauces using the remainder of the coconut milk: mix half of the cream with finely diced beets to make a pink sauce and keep half plain white.

9. To garnish: Use a 1 or 2-inch biscuit or cookie cutter, or similarly shaped circular item and stuff it tightly with the sticky rice forming a rice cake; top with a Tbs. of pink sauce. Place 2 beet hearts on top of that. Add a splash of white coconut sauce with the remainder of diced beets for contrast.

10. Serve and kiss.

Beverage: De Proef’s Primitive Ale
Soundtrack: Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”