Central Park District rolling

The Clarion Content has been most excited to read about the opening of the Geer Street Beer Garden in Durham's Central Park District. Andy Magowan has been doing good things on the Durham restaurant scene for a long time. He cut his teeth at a Durham institution, Foster's Market. He was also the first chef, and allegedly the guy who wrote the menu, at the place with the most consistently high quality bar food in Durham, The Federal.

One of our correspondents attended the Future Kings of Nowhere and Hammer No More the Fingers double billing at MotorCo the other night. The Geer Street Garden was hopping when he arrived and still going long and strong into the late evening.

By the by, Durham's Hammer No More the Fingers was tremendous. The polished wall of sound they produced damn near blew the doors off of the MotorCo. It was clear evidence of the band's prowess on the heels of a recent extended tour, first of the northeastern United States and then jolly old England. These guys stepped their game up to even another level!

Check out a couple of pics of the Geer Street Garden on the last days before opening. Read about what the situation was for this old gas station property as little as two years ago here.

Go, Durham!









On the corner of Foster and Geer Streets catty-corner from the also wonderfully resurrected King's Sandwich shop.

Some things should not be changed

While staring, befuddled at the new ribbed shape of the Mountain Dew 20 oz. plastic soda bottle today, it occurred to the Clarion Content that some things should not be changed. This is especially true if they worked wonderfully in their status quo format.

The goofy Mountain Dew bottle reminded us of this axiom. But the case in point also comes from the convenience store, it is the king size Snickers bar. Now in two pieces?

What???

Some company executive decided that you should pre-break our candy bars in two for us? Hey genius, people return broken candy bars as defective. What are you doing trying to preempt Super Size Me style class action lawsuits? "Oh no, your honor, our candy bar isn't designed to be eaten all in one session. It is two pieces."

Keep it real. First of all, it is designed to be eaten in one sitting whether you break it in half our not. You just make your loyal clientele feel worse about it by breaking it into two pieces. Plus, it creates an underlying sense of being defrauded. Is that two piece candy bar really the same size as the old king size Snickers? You can tell us it is all day, but it sure does not look or feel like it.

Mr.Mars Executive, quit trying to sell us broken candy bars! Fix the Snickers king size. Things which work really well, should not be changed.

World Beer Festival

Although we are not certain that the editorial staff of the Clarion Content will be able to attend this year, we highly recommend that you make it out to the World Beer Festival, Saturday October 9th. We try to attend every year, and surely at least some of the staff will be there this year. [The editor has the wedding of a dear friend.]

The event has two sessions, one afternoon and one evening. It has gotten a little pricier recently, up from $25 to $35 to $45 over the last six years, but it is still worth every penny. Featuring the beers of over 180 breweries from all over the United States and the globe, it is a rollicking good time. Our advices is as follows. Pick one session or the other, even the strongest livers should not be asked to handle both. Go slow, there is plenty of beer for everyone. Make sure you ask if the beer is high alcohol content, ever since the Pop the Cap initiative succeeded in North Carolina, quite a few of them are, sip gently these beers will rock you. Eat some of the food, there are plenty of delicious options. This year's beer festival will feature the music of Big Daddy Love and Children of the Horn for the afternoon session; Brushfire Stankgrass and Big Something are playing at the evening portion.

Tickets are available at their website here. And at the Carolina Ale House locations in the Raleigh Durham area.

A well kept Durham secret

This is the second of a seven part series about the home of the Clarion Content, Durham, NC. To read old Durham posts click here and scroll down. To see photos of Durham houses click here and scroll down.

There is a well-kept Durham secret at #325 W. Main Street, a part of downtown that has gotten better and better as Durham's urban renaissance continues. It is Guajillos Mexican grill. It is well known to the lawyers, judges, bail bondsmen and other members of the Durham legal community. It is located only blocks from the County Courthouse, not far from the newly opened Whiskey Bar. The reason why many of the our local readers will be familiar with Whiskey and not Guajillos is the hours. Guajillos is primarily open for lunch catering to the local, legal business community.

It is only a couple of doors down from another popularly, local, lunchtime eatery, the fabulous and more famous Toast. Guajillos is terrific, too. They specialize in Mexican and Colombian cuisine. Prices are very reasonable, a delicious lunch can be had for less than $7.00. The specialty of the house is Patacones, a Colombian Fried Plantain dish, that is out of this world. Also noteworthy are the Tortas (Mexican sandwiches) and the Arepa con Todo (a Colombian tortilla dish).

So save the $25 a head you were going to drop on Dos Perros and check out a wonderful, little hole in the wall joint, Guajillos.

Durham Food Culture

The Clarion Content and many of our local readers know this already, but Durham's food culture is amazing. Now the New York Times knows too. In a write-up published today, The Times interviews, among others, friend of the Clarion Content, Matt Beason about the restaurant he manages, Six Plates. Matt notes the veritable explosion of good restaurants in Durham in the last few years. The Times writer also talked to Amy Tornquist the owner of Watts Grocery. Note too that there was no mention of the wildly overrated and overpriced newcomer to downtown, Revolution.

An excerpt from the article follows.

"There are still plenty of good places for a barbecue plate, excellent French bistros like Vin Rouge and Rue Cler, and some white-tablecloth dining rooms, both traditional and modern.

But the most intriguing cooks here have a few things in common: an understanding of how to give a menu a sense of place; a true love of pork and greens in all their forms; and a lack of interest in linens and glassware...

The vast brick buildings still roll through the city center, emblazoned with ads for Lucky Strike and Bull Durham cigarettes. They are being repurposed as art studios, biotechnology laboratories and radio stations.

More important for food lovers, hundreds of outlying acres of rich Piedmont soil have “transitioned” from tobacco, and now sprout peas, strawberries, fennel, artichokes and lettuce. Animals also thrive in the gentle climate, giving chefs access to local milk, cheese, eggs, pigs, chickens, quail, lambs and rabbits."

The New York Times is not the first place to recognize the Durham food culture for the gem it is. In 2007 Gourmet magazine wrote up our area as one of the best in the country for Mexican food.

Food Rules

Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food announced on his website recently that he has a new book forthcoming. It will be called Food Rules. Pollan in his own words explains the premise,

"The idea for this book came from a doctor—a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read In Defense of Food, which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. “What I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for eating wisely,” they would say. “I don’t have time for the big nutrition lecture and, anyway, they really don’t need to know what an antioxidant is in order to eat wisely.” Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say “you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.” So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it – a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet-- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists –what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex—would have us believe. After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refine grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors, scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the vocabulary of science but rather culture—a source of wisdom about eating that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional science does.

Pollan says that his is a simple and unconventional diet book. It consists of sixty-four basic rules, each with a paragraph of explanation. It sounds like a powerful tool to the Clarion Content.

Check out Pollan's website here.

Mish Mash

One of the Clarion Content's favorite things about chili is its flexibility. Surely we have recipes we follow and adore, but some nights when we want chili it is simply a matter of grabbing some ground beef on the way home from the office, seasoning it to taste, and finding the right mish mash of ingredients in the pantry.

This experiment in pantry chili went over fairly well at a Monday Night Football gathering.

2 lbs ground beef, cook in a skillet with 1/4 stick of butter until meat is full browned. Season to taste throughout with salt, pepper, garlic, and chili powder. Our recommendation be liberal with all the seasonings but the salt. (This is the base for most of the Clarion Content's chili recipes)

Drain most of the grease from the frying pan and combine cooked ground beef in a large soup pot with two cans of drained black beans, one can of refried beans, and one can of tomato paste. Keep over low heat for at least thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. Continue to season with black pepper and chili powder. For extra kick, we added a couple of healthy dashes of habanero sauce.

Rumblings and grumblings

What we're hearing...

We are pestering some of our erstwhile restaurant reviewers and local bon vivants to give us an official statement, (as yet no luck). In the meantime, this what they are saying about a couple of local restaurants which we hope to review in full at a later date.

The word of mouth has been almost universally good about Tonali at #3642 Shannon Road near the newly remodeled Durham-27707 Post Office.

On the flip side, unfortunately, we have heard some negative comments, (overpriced, not that tasty) about the newly opened Dos Perros right around the corner from City Hall in a new Greenfire development called Rogers Alley. Clearly though, not everybody feels the same way.

Unfortunately, we have yet to be able to find the time to try either as a staff.

Check'em out for yourselves and let us know!

Interesting Pop Culture links

The Clarion Content always hopes to be a purveyor of interesting links. We regularly post an interesting links column on the main page, you can find them here. Today we have a new batch of pop culture links.

The first link is to an article about a Clarion Content favorite, In-N-Out. With apologies to Cookout, In-N-Out is bar none the single best fast food chain in America. It is only in California, Nevada and Arizona. They have done just the opposite of most American companies hewing closely to the founder Harry Synder's principles of of controlled growth, limited menu, fresh food and regional focus. However, now both the founder and his widow, Esther, have passed. The Los Angeles Times does a fabulous review of a new book on the future of In-N-Out by BusinessWeek writer Stacy Perman. Read it here.

The next one is a tricky situation. A sixteen-year old at Sickles High School in Tampa, Florida has gotten herself in an embarrassing predicament. The young lady decide not to wear any underwear on the day of the high school yearbook photos. In subsequent interviews she told a local television network it was because she didn't want her panty lines to show. (Ever heard of a thong?) Well the situation went from bad to worse when the young lady failed to cross her legs for a photo of the school's pottery club. More than 2,500 copies of the yearbook were distributed with a photo of the young lady's private parts on display. She has been unwilling to return to school. Her mother wants to sue the district which is refusing to recall the yearbooks while claiming the photo only shows a shadow. Oy gevalt, read more here.

For the final link it is back to the Los Angeles Times and a fascinating article about the changing place of the piano in the American home. Once a staple, pianos have become marginal in this day and age. What does that reflect at about the speed of culture and its allocation of time? What does it say about American dreams of upward mobility and middle class life? Interestingly at the same as piano sales have dropped from 105,000/yr to 54,000/yr, acoustic guitar sales grew to 1,348,000 from 611,000; and electric guitar sales from 543,000 to 1,520,000 per year. Maybe the piano industry needs to sponsor a piano-based video game, ala "Guitar Hero?" Read the full article here.

New Label

It is never a good sign when a food product one consumes fairly regularly suddenly adds a new safety label. Cook thoroughly is an especially unappealing notice. It was just added to the outside of the Totino's Combination Frozen Pizza box. What happened? Somebody cook it less than thoroughly and croak? Keel over? Fall out?

Don't take our food that we wish not to think about in that manner and make it scary.

Have you heard about the bacon explosion?

We are not saying that a bacon packing plant exploded. Nor are we saying that the popularity of bacon has suddenly increased, blown up, as it were. No, rather the "Bacon Explosion" is a recipe. It is a 5,000 calorie, 500 grams of fat plus bacon log.

Let us explain, it is a tube made out of a mat of 2 lbs. bacon, woven together around 2 lbs. of sausage. The New York Times reports that the creators, BBQAddicts.com, "bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, [they] thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight." Voilà! Bacon-loaf. It can be cooked in either an oven or a smoker.

Against the grain

You thought healthy was in? You thought excess was out? You thought independent restaurants were in trouble? Well here is a joint that is bucking the trend on all three levels, the Heart Attack Grill of Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix-Tempe.

The Heart Attack Grill is the concept of one Jon Basso. The centerpiece of the menu is an 8,000-calorie Quadruple Bypass Burger. It has four layers of cheese and 12 slices of bacon. The theme is continued throughout in numerous ways including a waitstaff dressed as sexy nurses, ala the Hooters girls. They also sell Flat-Liner Fries cooked in lard. They offer no-filter cigarettes for the adults and bubble gum cigarettes for the kids.

Can it get an more un-PC than that???

Maybe. If you eat the Quadruple Bypass Burger, you can elect to have one the waitstaff/nurses roll you out to your car in a wheelchair.

Read more here in the Nation's Restaurant News.

Let Freedom reign

An 140 year old lobster was freed from a restaurant holding tank where it spent ten days this month. City Crab and Seafood of New York City made the decision this week to release rather than cook the lobster. Hooray for the dignity of our fellow creatures! The lobster, who was captured off the coast of Newfoundland, is to be released near Kennebunkport, Maine, in an area where lobster trapping is forbidden. Read more here from the Associated Press.

Good grub

Unfortunately, dear readers the Clarion Content's crack correspondent failed to grab a photo of this resplendent meal. It was a terrific combination for the short days that make up the dark, cold depths of Winter. Perhaps, we will be able to lean on our sources for a recipe or a redo.

When the winds are howling, the fireplace is roaring and all you want to do is bundle up, you can't eat much better than this. The main attraction was a delightful turkey and dumplings pairing. Succulent and moist, it had a perfect texture and a hearty, sustaining warmth. It filled up a cold belly just right. The sides accompanying it were wonderful meshes of flavors. The first was a delicious puree of butternut squash with maple syrup and brandy. The second was spinach emulsified in butter with razor thinly slices of fresh garlic, all tossed in apple cider vinegar, a very inventive contrast of flavors.

The whole plate was a unity was beautiful winter colors of brown, orange and green. The strong savory flavor of the turkey dumplings was finely balanced by the sweet squash dish and offset again in a another direction by the distinctive spinach side.

It was another wonderful local meal by a Durham chef.

Ice Cream tip

WaDuke ice cream not pictured

Virginia Tech Men's Basketball coach Seth Greenberg reports that the Washington Duke Inn in Durham, NC has the best ice cream in the world, bar none. The Clarion Content has yet to try it, but we have to give Greenberg's opinion some credence. The widely traveled Coach Greenberg, a FDU graduate, has been on coaching staffs all over the country including: Columbia University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Virginia, the University of Miami, Cal State University at Long Beach, the University of South Florida and Virginia Tech.

We have to believe the man has tried ice cream in a lot of different cities and joints. And if he bothers, during an interview about his basketball team's prospects against mighty Duke next week, to throw a shout out to the locally known, WaDuke, as the best ice cream in the world, we think it is noteworthy.

We are going to give it a try. Stay tuned to this page for further updates.

Finally, a decent bagel

The Clarion Content has long sought after decent bagels in North Carolina, until recently it had been a trying and ultimately dissatisfying quest. Having northeast genetic stock on our editorial staff, standards were high. You don't bring Bruegger's bagels to the Clarion offices, lest you want to me mocked and derided until you run away cowering and crying. Bruegger's bagels are no more than one tiny half step removed from a frozen Lender's bagel (aka hockey pucks.) Lender's bagels are to bagels what Yugos are to cars, golf pencils are to writing implements, what dial-up internet is to a T1 line. Sure they are vaguely members of the same class, but they are craptastic. A Yugo hardly begins to make one understand the powerful possibilities of the automobile. A golf pencil can be used to scratch something down, but need to erase? Fugit about it. And if you grew up on MontBlanc's, you are never going to believe that someone else considers a golf pencil satisfactory. Really? Really? You are willing to accept that?

So one can only imagine how excited we were after ten long years of searching to finally encounter, not only a decent bagel in the Carolina's, but an excellent one. Previously we had not met a bagel in the state of North Carolina that we would have rated over a 4 out of 10. New York Bagel & Deli of Cary, NC is the diggity. Of course, made from scratch! Their bagels are old school, huge and just the right texture. Not to mention, they are not so blinded by blueberries and other fruits, as to neglect the traditional flavors; garlic, onion, poppy, seasame, pumpernickel and so on. Their staff is top notch, most days owners Tom and Josephine Nurrito* are behind the counter. Even when they're not, the service is always impeccable. And if it is not always delivered with a smile, the gruffness hides some genuine caring about the people and the product. Your happiness is assured, they won't let you leave less than satisfied. Maybe it is just all that experience, they have been a family business for over 75 years. (Most of it elsewhere, as 75 years ago Cary was a field.)

* Josephine always has a delightful smile.

Yummy Lentils

The Clarion was recently quite delighted with a new lentil recipe that a dear friend made. The party in question has a big family and typically prepares meals in quantity so as to be able to store freeze and reheat. This batch of lentils was probably made to triple the proportions that are shown in the recipe that follows below.


amateur lentil photography

#1----2 tsp good olive oil
#2----2 cups of yellow onions (large dice) approx 2
#3----2 cups carrots (large dice) approx 3 to 4
#4----1 tbs minced garlic approx 3 cloves
#5----1 26 oz can whole plum tomatoes
#6----1 cup french green lentils (approx 7oz)
#7----2 cups chicken stock
#8----2 tsp mild curry powder
#9----2 tsp chopped fresh time leaves
#10----2 tsp kosher salt
#11----3/4 tsp ground pepper
#12----1 tbs good red wine vinegar

heat #1, add #2 & #3 cook on medium low for 6-10 minutes until the onions start to brown, add #4 cook for 1 more minute, meanwhile food press #5 until coarsely chopped, add #5 thru #12 to the pan, raise heat to bring to a boil, then simmer for 40 minutes, let set for 10 minutes.

Our friend's version is light and sweet, but still hearty. There are layers of background flavors, first you taste the salt and the sweet, then there is a musky richness and finally the hint of curry. Complex, satisfying without being overwhelming, or ultimately too forceful; it was a very good meal. The first night it was served with a cast iron skillet of cornbread and orange-apricot marmalade.

In the Clarion's less than humble opinion it tasted even better day two and three, like so many gravies and soups. The second time it was served with a crumbled sour Pecorino Romano cheese.

A Delicious Bargain

Why isn't she smiling? Maybe she hasn't had breakfast yet?

The editorial desk of Clarion has long held that if there were any one meal that we recommended being a "regular" for it was breakfast. Now that is not a regular in the sense of eating breakfast daily, though surely we recommend that as an element of good health. No rather, we mean in the restaurant/bar sense of the word "regular." It is a milieu where being a "regular" implies being a familiar, weekly, if not almost daily customer of a given establishment. There is a relationship, they know you and you know them. Jack Nicholson was wonderfully portrayed an extremely difficult restaurant regular in "As Good as Gets." Many other regulars are more along the lines of Norm in the TV sitcom "Cheers."

The Clarion hasn't had a place where we have both had the desire and the budget to be a regular in a long time. And while we are not a regular yet at this place, we do have a delicious breakfast bargain to recommend that once again has the Clarion thinking about the joys of being a breakfast regular.

The place that brought this to mind is Durham's Parker & Otis. The Clarion will confess that there are numerous personal proclivities that draw us to Pando, as the employees call it. Firstly, it is walking distance from our offices. Second there are free coffee refills. Thirdly is the basic but delicious breakfast that has us thinking about breakfast regulars. The Clarion has always strongly favored the simple and hearty at breakfast. We don't want to think or work too hard, but we do want something to fire up the boiler room and get the body moving. We have long believed in breakfast as an essential metabolism regulator and energy provider.

At Parker and Otis they have found our number, and we theirs with a simple but delicious bargain, the #3. What is the #3 you ask? Two eggs any style, three crispy strips of bacon and a cheddar biscuit. Doesn't sound like much? Ahhh, but it simply kicks ass for $4.99. The eggs are from Latta Family Farm in Hillsborough, NC. The chef clarifies the butter before nailing them just right to order; some at the Clarion favor sunny-side up. The bacon is thickly sliced and applewood smoked. The biscuit is just the right texture and density to match the rich bacon and fresh eggs. The coffee is good, but the clincher is the fresh fruit garnish. Most diners kick you down a piece of stale kale, fast food never heard of a garnish, in faux classy places its a single orange slice. At Parker and Otis, where they care about what you eat, in recent weeks it has been a succulent fresh strawberry and a wedge of juicy pineapple. The coup de grace and the perfect palate cleanser.

Grateful not to be starving

Wanted to take a time out here at the Clarion.

We want to acknowledge how grateful we are to be where we are, in this country, in this day and age. We, like almost all Americans, should be profoundly grateful we are in no imminent danger of starving. During the course of human history this has not been the case for most human beings. Though things have improved, steadily if unevenly, still in the last 50 some odd years since the end of World War II, during the dawn of a post-modern era, untold millions have starved.

Any American who has traveled to the so-labeled 3rd world and gotten outside of the resorts will tell the tale. Unequivocally, most Americans are lottery winners in the game global population distribution. We are very lucky. We should be grateful. And hopefully we are grateful.

It is our firm belief that many Americans know this and feel gratitude. It is again to the fore because of the global food crisis that is unfolding. The good news is there has been some recognition and awareness as this situation has developed. Already America and Great Britain are responding with emergency food aid. The bad news is how severe some commentators say the situation is and how though the issue was seen coming, how little proactive action was taken. The skyrocketing cost of transportation is a key element in the rise of food prices. This price surge has been significant. The costs of other commodities have also been on the rise. The expanding middle class of China and India are contributing to the demand boom pushing price pressures.

Conditions are dire in some places. While it is not clearly dire in all of the following countries there have been outbreaks of rioting in Haiti, Cameroon, Bangladesh Indonesia, Cambodia, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. The crisis has been further stoked by the concomitant rise in the costs of staple cooking oils and fertilizer in many of the same countries. Tragically food crises tend to have exponential ripple and multiplier effects that make them worse as they go on. Malnutrition leads to less work, less fields getting tilled and planted, less efficient harvests. (As does more expensive and therefore less used fertilizer.) Worse yet, rather than respond by lowering tariffs and barriers and encouraging the production of more food, many governments have been responding with export bans and other attempts at hoarding.

The situation is difficult and there are no easy answers. We here at the Clarion don't have one. We firmly believe that deescalating the conflict in Iraq would remove some of the risk premium imposed on world oil prices and that this would have substantial positive knock on results for the price of food. But it is going to take some time for any long term changes in the course of policy, whether: deescalation, free trade or a change in biofuel strategy, to filter down to the local market place.

Emergency food aid and charity are vitally important in the short term. It is an American responsibility. (All wealthy countries share in this responsibility.) Amazingly enough, it is even an opportunity, an opportunity to burnish America's global reputation to remind the world what America once stood for, not preemptive warfare, but the Marshall Plan, not Gitmo, but the Peace Corps. America has many faces and does amazing things, the billions of dollars aid and charity that appeared in the wake of the Asian Tsunami tragedy of 2004 was but the most recent testament to this.

The final thought, gratitude. Gratitude. Not only should America and Americans participate in giving food aid worldwide, we should be profoundly grateful most of us don't need it. There are many places on this earth where stocked grocery stores and easy access to clean water would seem like luxuries.

Don't forget to give locally too!!

Vegan Trifle Recipe

A little bit of research effort and experimentation allowed the Clarion to develop a Vegan Trifle recipe this week. We have been enjoying trifle for many years, since it was first introduced to us by Foster's Market of Durham, North Carolina. The picture above is of the preferred shape trifle bowl.

Our typical non-Vegan trifle consists of bite sized chunks of white cake, pound cake or for a splurge, Krispy Kreme donuts, layered with fresh fruit, and Cool Whip or whip cream. The fresh fruit mix is simply seasonal. Strawberries are a stand-by. Blueberries and raspberries are great. Pineapple is lovely, peaches and kiwis are a fun experiment.

The Clarion has done almost no Vegan cooking, and absolutely no Vegan baking. Of late however, we have become fascinated with Vegan culture. Long radical Gaians ourselves, we see perhaps close cousins in the Vegans. Digging some into Vegan culture has inspired us to dig more. There are many voracious Vegan bloggers to devour.

Brainstorming the bloggers and other web sources yielded this nummy, nummy Vegan Trifle recipe.

First, bake the cake, then make the vegan whip cream equivalent. Refrigerate it for a minimum of three hours, if you have the space, chill the fruit and the trifle bowl, too.

the Cake

Banana-Flavored Vegan Cake

Ingredients:
1-1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup soy milk
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 to 2/3 of a medium sized banana

Preparation:
Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease a cake pan. In large bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Combine remaining ingredients in a blender and puree, then add to flour mixture. Beat for 2 minutes. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out dry.

After the cake cools, cut it into 1" x 1" chunks.


Whip Cream Equivalent

In a blender, combine:

two 10oz packages of silken style tofu
3 Tbs of maple syrup (optional substitute-coffee flavoring syrups)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup white sugar

pour into a container and refrigerate for several hours before using (ideally better to prepare and refrigerate the night before.)


Fruit (suggestions)

1 lb. of strawberries (cut them into halves or quarters depending on their size)
1 pint of raspberries or blueberries (just wash)
1 pineapple (cut into bit sized chunks)

After preparing all the fruit we like to combine it in a mixing bowl and add a couple of healthy dollops of honey, then stir gently. (if you are very confident that your blood sugar is low, along with the honey, add a couple of heaping spoonfuls of sugar in the raw.) You don't want to mush the fruit, just get it mixed evenly, so you don't later have a layer of all strawberries.


Now you're ready to move on to the Trifle bowl. The Clarion recommends the base layer be whip cream equivalent. Just cover the bottom of the bowl. Then throw in a layer of your bite sized cake chunks. Next a layer of your fruit mix, then a layer of whip cream equivalent, back to cake chunks, back to fruit mixture, another layer of whip cream, and repeat. The Clarion prefers the very top layer to be whip cream, with just a few decorative pieces of fruit and perhaps a mint sprig.