For software developers, Christmas means two things: dealing with bugs that waited until Christmas Day to make themselves known, and receiving gimmicky gifts. This year I was given Cooking for programmers 0x00, a cookbook whose recipes are written in the form of code from seventeen different programming languages. In keeping with the hacker tradition of taking jokes way too seriously, here’s my review.
The recipes
The recipes are for simple dishes such as carrot cake, tomato soup, and crêpes. I decided to try the PHP rice pudding, which involves simmering risotto rice in sweetened milk — I used oat milk — for half an hour. The resulting pudding, served with a dollop of raspberry jam, was a little disappointing. In the UK we tend to make rice pudding with a special high-starch rice variety known as ‘pudding rice’, which gives a creamy consistency, whereas this recipe’s use of risotto rice kept the grains more distinct.
The code
The blurb on the back of the book claims it gives you “the opportunity to get a feeling for programming languages you have not yet used”. Based the on the recipes in languages I have used, this book doesn’t give an good impression of typical code in these languages. The PHP code uses the global keyword and has untyped function signatures, the Typescript code has a huge switch statement turning strings into identical strings when an enum should have been used instead, and the Rust code using string concatenation when the format! macro would have been more readable.
In summary, this book is neither a useful cookbook nor a good overview of how different programming languages approach a similar problem. After forty-five years, the Unix philosophy still applies: do one thing and do it well. And remember: hackers always take jokes too seriously.
At some point over the last few days I realised that my habit of buying any vegan pigs in blankets I see in the wild has lead to a problem. Namely that I have way too many pigs in blankets to eat on Christmas Day. So why not have a festive Christmas Eve buffet of nothing but pigs in blankets and also draw up a score board to justify this gluttony.
The rules of this contest are as follows. We had three brands of pigs: Plant Kitchen from M&S, Plant Menu from Aldi, and This Isn’t that we got from Tesco. Kate and I had two each to sample and then we had to come up with a score out of five, which would be added together to make a score out of ten. Though actually that ended up being pointless, we gave everything the exact same score as each other. We’ve probably been together too long.
The This Isn’t Pork offering looked pleasingly rustic and cooked in the shortest time. We both thought it had the best bacon but the whole thing was let down by the sausage. The sausage is herby and overpowering. It’s not what you want from the piggie in your blanket. We gave this a 4 out of 10.
Plant Kitchen is next. These took the longest to cook, and were messy to get out of the packet. The sausage is a more mushroom-based offering. It has a casing which makes it the more realistic of today’s sausage. It overpowered the bacon though and was a little too greasy. We like these ones and gave them a 6 out of 10.
Our favourites are these Plant Menu piggies. They’re more of a balanced taste and not as greasy. They do look weirdly artificial but you can’t argue with the taste. 8 out of 10.
A tin full of cookies with chocolate chip and candied orange peel showing through
Because I haven’t seen my family in a while, I was feeling rather generous towards them. Because I was feeling rather generous towards them, I made marmalade. Because I made marmalade, I had leftover marmalade. Because I had leftover marmalade, I’ve revitalised this recipe from the old blog.
Home-made marmalade is best, with nice big chunks of candied orange peel.
Ingredients
110g vegan butter (we use Naturli) 65g caster sugar 95g marmalade 250g plain flour 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 50g of chocolate chips
Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC and prepare a baking tray
Cream together the butter, sugar and marmalade.
Mix in the flour, bicarb, and salt, and form a dough.
With your hands, gently knead the chocolate chips into the dough.
Break off a tablespoon’s worth of dough and roll into a ball. It may be easier to wet your hands to do this. Flatten the ball slightly against the baking tray.
Repeat until you have about 12 cookies on the tray. Or until you run out of dough.
Cook in the oven for 10 minutes.
Allow to cool on the tray for five minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
When we in the UK think of food in the US it often looks like food from Epic Vegan: burgers, hotdogs, pizza, doughnuts. Deep fried overindulgence. I’m not knocking it; there’s just a bit of an unfortunate knowledge gap. Which is why I’ll buy pretty much any book with ‘vegan’ and ‘soul food’ in the title. This is my favourite so far. Nadira Jenkins-El’s Vegan Soul Food Cookbook. There’s a great selection of recipes in here and you can tell it’s been written by a professional cook. The recipes are straightforward and unfussy, yet still satisfying. Here are six reasons why I think you should get a copy:
Spiced rice with kidney beans and chard
If you want a quick, simple and so, so filling combo this is the one for you. Caribbean Coconut Greens have become a staple around here. Mostly because ordinarily Kate hates chard (on the other hand when I was a veg grower my boss said to me ‘I’ve never seen someone so into chard’ like I was some chard loving weirdo… not the point). The greens here are cooked in with some herbs, a bit of liquid smoke, and coconut cream to make a rich, flavourful side dish. Here it’s served with Island-Style Rice and Beans. And this is the rice and beans dreams are made of. It serves six and we are two so when I make it I have some leftover for the freezer. Not as much as I should though because I keep going back for a little sneaky spoonful.
Fusilli served in a ‘cheese’ sauce, Popcorn chicken and Broccoli
Looking back at this picture in the future I’ll know it was taken in the autumn of 2020. Why? Well, two reasons. One is the overcooked broccoli. There were a couple of months last year where I could not cook broccoli if my life depended on it (luckily it didn’t). I steam it for four minutes, it’s still raw. I steam it for five and it’s mush. I just couldn’t get it right. Then in December suddenly it’s all okay again and I do not understand. The other thing is the fusilli. I’m not known for using the correct pasta shape to match the sauce but usually I’ll at least be able to get one with a hole through it for Mac and Cheese. But you know what getting pasta has been like recently. This is Butternut Squash Mac ‘n’ “Cheese”. Butternut squash mac ‘n’ cheese has become a bit of a vegan staple recently but to be honest most of them are trash. Actually all of them are trash except this one. This one is really, really good. It’s not hiding the fact that it comes from a vegetable and has a nice cheesy note to it. It’s one of the first recipes I’ll turn to if a butternut squash turns up on the doorstep. Which they tend to because we get a veg box.
‘Ribs’ straight from the grill, still sat on tinfoil
These Barbecue Riblets are incredible. They’re a seitan/jackfruit combo which makes them moist and tender, and gives it the perfect pull-apart but not fall-apart texture. It’s smothered in the delicious Jerk Barbecue Sauce which is really quick to whip up. The cook time for these is fairly long but not very difficult and you won’t regret the effort.
Cubes of fried tofu smothered in Buffalo sauce in a bright red bowl
The hardest part of this one is remembering to freeze and thaw the tofu. These are the Buffalo Popcorn Chickenless Bites. Fried in about five minutes and tossed in Buffalo sauce. I may have eaten the whole bowl myself. Don’t worry. I went foraging for vegetables after. Also I only made half the recipe so that’s only supposed to serve 3, not 6.
Six tarts with a pecan pie filling on a white plate
I decided that this review wouldn’t be complete without something from the sweet section so I spent yesterday morning making up 12 of these adorable little Pecan Pie Mini Tarts. I love each and every one of them. They have a perfect crisp crust and sweet nutty filling. Everything you want from a tiny pie.
Coastal Vegans 