Recent cooking

Charred eggplant and walnut pesto pasta salad - I dislike eggplant unless it's cooked just right, but this was quite delicious and not as bad as I expected with the prep time -- though it was challenging to handle the pasta, the pesto, and the eggplant all at once.

For my Tony viewing snack I made a fruit compote with strawberries, cherries, ginger, and a little lime juice. Served it over ice cream. Actually I didn't let it cool down enough before I ate, so I served it over melted ice cream, but it was still delicious.

We're almost at that time of year when I want to eat nothing but avocado on toast. Luckily I do have some avocados. I'm looking forward to having central air...

The Taco Cleanse

"ALERT: Are you getting enough of the color blue in your diet? Colors are so important to the way our bodies function, and since the ocean is blue, it's especially critical that our bodies get enough blue in. The thing is, it can be tough to get blue food into your everyday diet without making conscious choices to choose blue! We developed this recipe to help."

The recipe?

Blue corn chip-crusted tofu.

The Taco Cleanse is both a cookbook for vegan tacos and a gentle send-up of health-and-nutrition-related pseudoscience, woo, and the very concept of cleanses. (Laura Beck of Vegansaurus writes in the foreword: "Cleanses are the fucking worst. They're socially acceptable starvation disguised as health, and that is the fucking worst.") In a nod to Cafe Gratitude, the book contains recipes like "Affirmation Cumin-Onion Rice," "Energizing Dutch Waffle Tacos," and "Euphoric Avocado Wedges.

I will confess that my first thoughts when I heard about this book were, in order, "LOL," and "Oh actually I could definitely use some recipes for veg*n tacos." Not all of the humor bits work -- the section on "Taco Mudras" is uncomfortably ambiguous between making fun of white hippie appropriation of eastern spirituality, and just making fun of eastern spirituality. But mostly it manages to thread a weird, thin line -- silly yet practical, deadpan and serious in its total conviction about the healing power of eating more tacos.

I will have to report back once I find out whether the recipes are any good or not. (Not Dutch Waffle Tacos. No. Well, I mean, if I had a waffle iron...)