Hippie Food

Let's bring back alfalfa sprouts

Last weekend was my second popup dinner at Collar City Mushrooms, the coziest mushroom farm in the Hudson Valley. I served a four-course mushroom meal amidst the pink-lit grow bags and Twin Peaks-y fungal art pieces that decorate the space. The evening was beautiful and a number of people asked for my recipes, so I’ll be sharing those with paid subscribers over the next few weeks (remember, all you have to do is refer a new reader for access to a month of free recipes!). Here’s the first one, which combines grilled corn and corn fungus into a fresh, umami-forward salad:

Corn huitlacoche salad (v, gf)

The event went so well that I’ve been thinking about taking on more catering gigs — do you have an event coming up in the fall or next year that would be enhanced by a lovely meal, fun snacks or a creative dessert? I’d prefer to work in the Hudson Valley but could come in to NYC as well. Shoot me an email and we can talk about ideas.

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There’s that smell when you walk into a health food store, you know the one? Kind of yeasty and nutty and dusty-in-a-good-way, like flour or rice. It makes me hungry just to think about. I could use some more nutritional yeast and maybe I’ll buy nuts if the prices are good. What’s the seaweed selection like? Do they make in-house carob energy bites or whole wheat fig bars?

Though my parents are yuppies not hippies (sorry guys), I’ve had a long cozy relationship with hippie food as consequence of 20+ years of vegetarianism. I owned two Moosewood cookbooks as a teenager, and when I moved to NYC I was excited to discover Angelica Kitchen and the $3-suggested-donation vegan buffet at the Hare Krishna temple a block from my dorm (where I got my taste for nutritional yeast). Now that I’ve moved to the Hudson Valley, I’m emboldened to give full rein to my hippie food desires. I do my bulk shopping at Mother Earth Storehouse, which is a gigantic (to me) store that’s like what Whole Foods would be if it never expanded. I’m near a million small farms, dairies, and mills, and even the ShopRite has local yogurt and the IGA sells foraged mushrooms and pawpaws in the fall.

This isn’t the essay to get into hippie food as a political movement (go to Diet for a Small Planet or Jonathan Kauffman’s recent history Hippie Food for that), but as fall settles in and I’m feeling cozy, I wanted to write an ode to this cuisine that I come back to more than anything else. By “hippie food,” I mean what you think I mean. Hummus, nut butters, alfalfa sprouts, granola. Macrobiotic brown rice and tamari. Tofu, in expected and unexpected places (cheesecake?). There’s a recipe in the Superiority Burger cookbook for what they jokingly-not-jokingly call the “Hippy Wrap” that’s got tofu, brown rice, carrots, sunflower seeds, and a spicy tahini-maple sauce. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I want. Let’s go.

The Sandwich

The Sandwich must be made on wholegrain or multigrain bread, no stretchy white sourdough here. It must contain sprouts and avocado and pesto or hummus. It may include other vegetables like cucumbers, lettuce, tomato or shredded carrots. I would like some slices of white cheddar, but if you’re vegan, tofu will do.

I have no memory of this sandwich surfacing in my life and it’s hard to find out much about its path through American cuisine, though it must have originated in Southern California because of the avocados. I once convinced my local Italian deli to make it for me because they had all the ingredients (except for the sprouts) but usually I make it myself.

Lukas Volger posted a picture of The Sandwich from a place in Sydney this summer that I and so many others swooned over that he wrote it up as a recipe. His contains kale pesto, avocado, alfalfa sprouts, Granny Smith apple slices, lettuce, and a honey-mustard dressing. Again, I’d want cheese, but the apple is a nice twist.

The Power of Nutritional Yeast

I’ve already mentioned nutritional yeast about 3000 times because of how much I love it and how closely I associate it with hippie food. In the dining hall at my Zen monastery, there’s a jar of the stuff next to the cutlery, and I note the others who, like me, douse their whole plate with yellow flakes.

If you’re not familiar, “nooch” (always hated that name) is a dried version of yeast that is supposed to contain the B12 that isn’t readily supplied by a plant-based diet (but this is contested). It’s strongly umami, and has been used as a cheese substitute in vegetarian recipes since the 70s, with varying degrees of success. I don’t really buy it as a vegan cheese, but I appreciate it in its own right.

One of my favorite snacks is to slice up a block of firm tofu, fry it on a pan until all the water is gone and it’s brown on both sides, then toss it — still warm — in a bowl of nutritional yeast. I like to save these slabs in the fridge to snack on cold, but Miro has already clocked how good they are, so they don’t last long. I love using nutritional yeast in salad dressings full of ground almonds or cashews, turning a pile of lettuce into something rich and satisfying, or as a dip (e.g. “Bitchin sauce”). I shared this recipe for “Hippie mushroom salad” a little while ago, which is a basic nutritional yeast dressing that incorporates dried mushroom powder for extra umami.

Grain Bowls

At least once a week, our dinner consists of brown rice with some kind of vegetable, tofu or tempeh, and sauce. It’s difficult to distinguish what makes a grain bowl “hippie food” as opposed to “what a substantial part of the world regularly eats,” though the brown rice is part of it (brown rice is a foundational element of the macrobiotic diet, which is itself a foundational element of hippie food). Sweetgreen and Digg sell grain bowls now, but nothing they sell will ever be hippie food to me. Life Alive in Boston makes some of the best bowls I’ve had.

At home, I’ve been cooking my brown rice with a spoonful of Better than Bouillon vegetable or mushroom base. The sauce might be the leftover marinade from the tofu (soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and sometimes sugar) or a tahini miso sauce (with a little rice vinegar and hot water to loosen it). The vegetables are whatever I roasted in big batches over the weekend (eggplant, bell pepper, sweet potato, broccoli, etc) or some greens cooked down in more Better than Bouillon broth. And, of course, I often sprinkle it all with nutritional yeast.

Breakfast foods

One of those first Moosewood cookbooks I had was the Sunlight Cafe. On the cover, morning light streams in through a garden window, illuminating a table crowded with fresh flowers, a pitcher of orange juice, cut grapefruit, hardboiled eggs, and a martini glass full of some kind of berry compote. My mind’s eye sees further, into a large room of dark wood, worn armchairs, and books for borrowing. I smell bran muffins or multigrain waffles. To the table, I’ve added tempeh bacon and tofu scramble, a crockpot of steel-cut oats, yogurt, homemade granola, and honey produced by the bees knocking at the window. (Would you stay at my B&B?)

Outside of a perfect croissant, I love the most grainy nutty baked goods I can get. In this newsletter, I would say that my molasses pecan banana bread, buckwheat almond waffles, and chia oatmeal pancakes are prime examples of this vibe. There’s a family bakery business up here called Happy Belly that makes gluten-free baked goods that are dense with nuts and seeds and dried fruit, not necessarily breakfast food, but also extremely the vibe. You eat a sweet treat and are full for 5 hours.

Right now I’m eating a typical breakfast of plain yogurt, fresh peanut butter, and granola. The way the peanut butter swirls into the yogurt is sort of disgusting, but also great. Sometimes the yogurt is Cabot cottage cheese and there’s cut-up fruit or jam swirled in.

Postscript: Apple Cider Vinegar

I’m not really an apple cider vinegar freak (listen to this Maintenance Phase episode for some wild shit) but I do think it makes almost everything taste better. Every time I drive back from Canada, I haul an (illegal?) growler of it in the trunk. It goes into salad dressings of course, but also beans and stews and random baked goods, where it can help activate baking powder. My next newsletter will be all about my Shrub Era, in which ACV figures prominently.

I’ve gone on more than enough…What hippie food do you love? Any recipes you’d like to share? And my final thoughts — sundried tomatoes. xxx

What I’m Cooking