I think if you went to a party where you didn't know anyone, or maybe one of those meet-and-greet mixers, or some vulnerably awkward situation where you needed to quickly find something interesting to talk about with strangers, you should start talking about lasagna. Every American child of the 90s has a soft spot for lasagna. Lasagna night was awesome. Lasagna filled with something creamy and tangy, or something fresh like tomatoes, or chewy like mushrooms, or meaty, like lentils... there are so many possibilities. As long as you have that doughy pasta bite covered in salty red tomato sauce, it doesn't matter if it's lasagna rolls, lasagna soup, or stuffed shells. You can't really go wrong. You could start by saying, "I made this vegan lasagna last night!" Then, "Yeah, it's vegan!" Then, "it had spinach, artichokes, lentils, Oh and this crumbly parmesan-style topping!" And eventually, "Oh you have to try it, I'll give you the recipe..."

The best thing about lasagna is that it makes a TON. You won't have to cook for a week. And you get to eat lasagna for a whole week. So that's like a bonus.

If you tell a kid you're taking them out for ice cream, then decide not to go, you're pretty much the grinch. If you tell your friend you're meeting them at Beyond Sushi Friday afternoon, then cancel, you're the worst friend ever. It'll take weeks for sushi to leave the brain. But worst of all, if you plan to make Injera crepes with your injera starter this weekend along with an Ethiopian feast, and then your starter fails??? That is suffering. You pretty much have to make it anyway. I can't see how you could come back from such a hardship without a substantial substitute for injera and tons of WAT.

I kept thinking I was only going to make 4 stews. I had a stockpile of cabbage shreds from golabkis last week, so it was clear I was to make Tikil Gomen with it. I've been wanting to make shiro for a while, so I thought I would make that too, along with Atkilt Alecha, because Alex loves green beans. At the farmers market I found this little awesome sugar pumpkin! I thought it could rock the house if it got roasted and mashed with berbere and simmered in the best apple cider in the world, also found at my local farmers market too. And it did, folks. The house was rocked.

While I was cooking the Tikil Gomen and Atkilt Alecha, I was like... how are you gonna leave off the lentils. Lentils are everyone's fav. So I simmered them too. Then I thought about that awesome Avocado salad we had at the last few Ethiopian places we've been to in the city, and I thought it would be easy enough to make too. Then I thought we needed another cold dish, and Butecha is so fun to make, and so I made that too. Then I thought of how much I miss mushrooms and never make them anymore because Alex doesn't like them. I love mushrooms, guys. I can't live without them. So I made Ingudai tibs too. Then I forgot about my pumpkin in the oven, and mashed it up with a ton of berbere and niter kibbe, and simmered it in my awesome apple cider I got. I toasted the seeds up in my skillet while it simmered, and noticed that when the seeds get really hot, they start to spin SO FAST! Then they pop and fly out of your pan and at your face, so be careful. Cool, though. This morning I found one on my floor and thought it was a bedbug. Nope. Just a pumpkin seed. Phew. So yeah, that's the story of how I went from making 4 dishes to 8. They ruled though, you gotta believe me.

Wigilia is at our house this year. I am so excited. I love when it's at my house because I get to make all the food. We rotate, because I think everyone but me hates hosting it. [If you are like, way lost as to wtf I'm talking about, I'm real Polish, and we celebrate Christmas Eve every year together, traditional Polska style. The celebration is called Wigilia, and it's at my house this year, and I'm PSYCHED.]

I've made pierogis every year since veganhood, and this year will be no different, except I am also making golabkis too! We never have them at our table, because traditional golabkis [call them guh-wump-kees] are made with ground beef and Wigilia is a meat-free celebration. Except that my family doesn't understand that fish is meat. So fish is always present too. Anyways, Alex and I don't eat the fish, so I make a hundred and seven other things every year that we can enjoy. I had a few golabki recipes bookmarked for testing, but I really wanted to make it with a lentil filling, so I just played it fast and loose. 

"Blanching" the cabbage is the hardest part in my opinion. I don't have a pot big enough to fill with water and still fit a cabbage in there. It was kind of messy. Basically, I boiled water, dropped the cabbage in, the water went everywhere, so I shut off the burner, moved the pot to the sink and dumped out a little water, covered it, and let it sit in the boiling water for about an hour. If you have a massive pot, you could just boil it for about 15 minutes and remove it like a normal person.

The best part was the creamy tomato sauce that goes with these. I made it in my Vitamix, so I just poured it into the pan, no messy, annoying ladling involved. Look how beautiful it looks!

Alex was skeptical of them, but he ate both golabkis I put on his plate, so I'm pretty sure it's a win for me. Very excited about the win.

Golabkis

1 large head green cabbage

1-2 teaspoons olive oil

1 white onion, diced

4 cloves garlic, chopped

2 cups dried green lentils

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon hot smoked paprika

2 teaspoons aleppo pepper

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon coriander

1 teaspoon dried dill

1 teaspoon dried thyme

Sauce:

5 large very ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped

2 teaspoons olive oil

1/2 white onion, roughly chopped

3 cloves garlic, sliced, or roughly chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

3/4 cup cashews

juice of half a lemon

Boil water in the largest pot you have. Cut the core out of your cabbage by cutting a cone-shaped hole at the stem, and removing it in one big piece. Drop the cabbage into the boiling water and boil for about 15 minutes. Alternatively, you can soak the cabbage in a bowl big enough for it covered in boiling water for about an hour. Remove from water and let cool slightly. 

Carefully peel the leaves away from the cabbage, without ripping them. Lay a leaf flat on your cutting board. Using a sharp pairing knife, cut the thick stem away so that the leaf lays much flatter than before. This will help you form easier rolls. Repeat with remaining cabbage leaves and set aside. Make filling:

Boil the lentils about 40 minutes, until tender. Drain and set aside.

Heat olive oil in a cast-iron skillet. Add the diced onion and cook about 5 minutes, until starting to brown. Add garlic and cook 1 more minute until the garlic is fragrant. Add lentils, cumin, coriander, dill, thyme, salt, aleppo and black pepper. Stir to coat the lentils, and cook about 3 minutes, until any water from the lentils has evaporated. Turn off heat.

Make the sauce by sautéing the onion in the olive oil until light brown. Turn heat up and add tomatoes. Let them get charred on all sides by leaving them cut side down on the pan without interrupting them for 2 minutes at a time. Once the tomatoes have some char on them, add the garlic and stir for 1 minute.

Transfer tomato mixture to a blender with the cashews, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Blend on high for 6 minutes. 

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Scoop about 1/4 cup of filling into a cabbage leaf, fold two edges over the filling, then roll up the rest of the way, encasing the filling. Just like a burrito. Repeat with remaining rolls.
Pour about 1/3 of the sauce into a baking dish big enough to hold all the cabbage rolls, to coat the bottom with the sauce. Carefully nestle the rolls into the pan so that they all fit nice and snug. Top with more sauce, cover the pan in foil and bake for 40 minutes. Let cool for ten minutes before serving, and serve with extra sauce.

When someone who doesn't really cook decides they are going to make a fancy dinner for someone else, how often is it stuffed shells? I feel like it's pretty often. When we think of the fanciest dinner we had in our youth, I feel like it was stuffed shells at an Italian restaurant that you went to with your family for someone's birthday. There's something amazing about creamy ricotta, or ricotta-like cheese with herbs stuffed inside pasta, then smothered in tomato sauce. It's like lasagna, except you get more of it per person without looking weird. 

Stuffed shells are fancy-looking and satisfying but relatively brainless to put together. I mean, you've made them at least 500 times, so it's not like you're using much of the much-needed and reserved brain power you've got left after a ten-hour shift and an hour train-ride home. So just when you think you've got only enough juice left to burn out on the couch with Chinese take-out and an episode of Parks and Rec, wait. You can definitely make shells. It's almost easier than calling for the take-out.

So fancy, you break out the actual table for dinner. Now that's saying something.

Ethiopian has become my favorite cuisine to eat over the last year or two. It's served differently than most other cuisines serve their food, almost family style, but literally, you all share one plate. Instead of forks and knives, you use sourdough crepes to pick up the food and eat it. And damn, are those crepes good. Since the arrival of Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romero, I've been wanting to make Ethiopian food at home more, and since her book includes a slew of recipes from the spice blend to the crepes, I went to town. Or stayed in my kitchen. You get the idea.

The spice blend, berbere, is really fun to make, especially if you're easily amused by making spice blends. I don't normally make such blends, but it is pretty fun to make, and not difficult at all. Also, all the recipes call for a spiced oil, called nitter kibbe, which is made in a large batch ahead of time along with the spice blend. It's great and buttery and full of yellow turmeric which at any moment may strike down upon your counter and turn it neon yellow. For a while. Good thing yellow is my favorite color.

Traditionally, they make these huge (I mean really huge) crepes and serve them on a (really) huge platter with piles of stews or dishes on top of the crepe. Since, I don't have a way to produce such large and beautiful crepes, I made smaller ones and served them on individual plates. Also, crepes are kind of a bitch to make. I'm not very good at making them. I found the smaller pan I tried, the more success I had. But I still didn't have boatloads of successful crepes. I did however have some. And with those, I shoveled delicious Ethiopian food into my mouth. Purpose served.

When I get Ethiopian food at a restaurant, I always get the vegetarian sampler, because I could never imagine getting to eat only one of these dishes per visit. The more variation, the better. When you're making it at home, it results in cooking like five dinners worth of food in preparation for one dinner. So basically, it was a ton of work. But it was totally worth it, and I will totally do it again :) 

I made this big spread for my friends, who seemed pleased by the authenticity of the dishes.  I think it's all about the spice blend. That's what gives it that perfect restaurant-quality. From the left to right, I made ingudai tibbs, which are portabello mushrooms in berbere sauce, but'echa, which is chickpea shallot and jalapeño eggy crumbles, Seitan tibbs, which is seitan in berbere sauce, yemisir wat, a spicy berbere lentil stew, and potatoes and green beans in berbere sauce. My favs were mushrooms and the egg-like chickpea crumbles, though all were good.

For dessert, I made the Ethiopian Chocolate Flourless Torte, the last recipe in the book. It's silken tofu-based, with a little berbere spice. I made this during testing, but used cayenne for mexican chocolate cake, my fav. This worked just as well. I could taste just a hint of spice. I suppose that's how it outta be. I'm always tempted to put way too much cayenne or spice thinking I won't taste it otherwise and they turn out ungodly spicy. These tasted kind of brownie-like, which is good. Everybody like brownies, right?

Overall, I had a great time cooking, a great time eating, and a great time hanging with my friends and feeding them delicious food! I'll raise a spicy brownie to many more dinners like this one :)

So my kind-of-step-brother Steve has this chili dip that he always makes for every family occasion. He doesn't cook anything otherwise, but when there's an occasion for him to make this dip, like during a playoffs Celtics game, New Years Eve, or just when all 12 or something of us bros and sisses find ourselves gathered together again for a movie or a beer at the house. (That just made me miss home a lot!) Anyways, he gets so excited to make this chili dip, and passes it around to everyone all wide-eyed and wants everyone to like it. When he gets to me, he always goes, "Oh yeah! I forgot you can't eat... anything in this dip!" I only find it adorable how excited he gets when he cooks up his special dip for everyone. So, thinking of Steve, I made a taco-inspired dip with all the fix-ins. And damn, does she light up a lens.