Coomer - BLUE MOON VEGAN

Booktrope Editions

Seattle WA 2015

Copyright 2015 Paula Marie Coomer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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Cover Design by Greg Simanson

Interior design by Kate Burkett

Edited by Bethany Root

Trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners. No claim is made to them and no endorsement of them by this book or recipes is implied or claimed.

Print ISBN 978-1-62015-548-6

EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-564-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015900828

For Marba Lou, Delta, Hazel,and, of course, Phil

No book is written without a considerable amount of help, but in this case, Blue Moon Vegan never would have materialized had it not been for Kate Burkett, my book manager at Booktrope, whose subtle insistence and belief in its value finally convinced me to take on the project. Kate has been a phenomenal supporter of my food writing, and I feel very lucky to have her in my corner. Just yesterday a fellow author reminded me that during a radio interview earlier this year, I had sworn that I would not write a follow-up cookbook to my food memoir Blue Moon Vegetarian. Kates faith in my abilities left me no choice but to take the leap. She keeps maneuvering me to the next level, and what was once a working relationship now is friendship. I no longer resist her quiet prodding.

From the beginning, my husband Phil and I doubted that we could come up with enough recipes to fill an entire cookbook. We have been living all this time convinced that Blue Moon Vegetarian was an accident and not repeatable. From all evidence, it appears we were wrong. Just this morning he came to me with an idea for a rice dish that features garlic scapes and dried cranberries steeped in vegetable stock. People for whom haute cuisine is not inherent dont wake up imagining new flavor intersections or unique dishes to create.

As for me, I keep saying, Im a poet. Im a writer of fiction. Im not a cook.

Yet here I am. A number of these recipes were created by Phil, and most of the baked goods were contributed by Jan Calvert, owner of Bridge Baking Company, the wondrous gluten-free bakery just across the river from us in Lewiston, Idaho. But the rest of them are mine, so I guess I do have to stand up and admit that I have my fair share of ability in the kitchen. Its my feminist nature that makes me want to fight it. In the end, as Ive struggled to bring this book together, Ive understood that creating with food is truly an art and not necessarily in competition with my married-but-not-domestic image of myself. Phil still spends more time cooking than I do, but if I am going to be in the kitchen, I much prefer to be inventing.

And I do know where this ability comes from. I spent many hours as a child observing and following around in the kitchens of their mountain homesteads my two grandmothers, both of whom could make magic arise from a collection of meager ingredients. They carried water from the well, cooked and baked on wood cook stoves, grew and harvested and canned and preserved almost everything that passed to their mouths from the table. I remain humbled by the knowledge those two women carried within themselvesthe wisdom of plants, the ways of the natural world, the bounty that could be brought forth from well-nurtured soil. My wish is that by writing this cookbook, I have somehow cast back onto the world their love and nurturing, healing woman spirits. And that by doing so, I have laid a similar path for my own three granddaughter-miracles.

A book also does not happen without the gift of space, and for me that comes down to Dawn Abbott and the Blue Lantern Coffee House, also across the river in Lewiston. As any student of sociology knows, we humans require what is known as third space a regular spot apart from home and jobwhere we can relax, be ourselves, and engage with others. For me that is Dawns place. She has endured me for hours and hours and days and days in her backroom as I hovered over the keyboard and sipped her fine espresso, listened and mourned with me when, on the day of my original deadline, the entire manuscript for this book suddenly and irretrievably vanished from my hard drive. She has hosted my readings and a series of cooking classes; cajoled and advised; and provided a beautiful, soothing, yet dynamic setting filled with art, plant life, and antiquesa perfect backdrop for her baked goods made with organic and local ingredients, as well as her very fine fair trade coffee. She is a force of her own: the persistent traffic over her transom and the growing familiarity of those faces proves that she is providing a third space to many, indeed.

Im not sure which came first: my panic over agreeing to do a follow-up to Blue Moon Vegetarian , or my frantic recognition of the fact that I had no idea what recipes would go in a breads and desserts section. Ive gotten better at gluten-free baking, but I felt my best choice was to visit Jan Calvert, who owns our regions only gluten-free bakery and who also had hosted a Blue Moon Vegetarian event. Bless her heart. She is not vegan, but she had started to offer egg-free and dairy-free items on Saturdays as a result of customer requests. Without skipping a beat, she agreed to continue converting her bestsellers for inclusion in Blue Moon Vegan . Her only question was, Whats my limit on the number of recipes? For readers who have tried and failed to bake tender breads and pastries using gluten-free ingredients, you are home free. Jans method of weighing flours instead of measuring makes perfect sense to me and also explains why I used to get inconsistent results when baking with wheat flour. I have never been overly fond of cinnamon rollsin fact, we eat very few sweet things at our housebut when she sat me down to test her vegan, gluten-free version, I almost cried. It tasted that wonderful. Soft and full-bodied, it did not leave me with a sugar buzz or the all-body wheat-sizzle I used to get after eating a pastry. In other words, I felt nourished. By a pastry! During the past few months, Jan also has become a dear friend, and once this book goes to editing, we have a celebration evening planned that we both fully intend to keep.I also must mention Mallory Fry and Kaitlyn Bergman. These two very beautiful young women design the most fabulous craft cocktails for one of our neighborhood gathering places, also using local ingredients in season and organically-grown when possible. I will have a price to pay when my mother reads this, since she raised me a teetotaler, but I felt these recipes were too yummyeven as virgin drinksnot to include. They are flat medicinal and are satisfying in a way that does not invite abuse. A small amount of alcohol now and again has health payoffs in the form of the socialization and relaxation that comes with enjoying them, not to mention benefits to the cardiovascular system, but I in no way advocate habitual use, and I believe we all need to very careful about the amount we do consume.