The music is playing, the apron is on. We're
here live at his Fox 61 by Carrier
Kitchen where we're gonna merge
plant food, plant based food, plant
based food and
fast food and Angie Monkey. They go together
in a delicious way. I want
you to say hi to Mark shall,
Mark the chef, one of his lovely
wife been running for many years,
AG Zen down in Brantford, which I want
to quote the New York Times here.
They called it a vegan
retreat for carnivores. Sure.
And I gotta tell you the food
in there was so fantastic and.
And the best part was to.
To a carnivore. Yeah. You couldn't tell.
Sure. Really delightful stuff.
You've reimagined it.
You had a truck for a guy and you
still have the truck but you.
But you said,
you know what let's let's take
the really gourmet stuff and kind
of dial it down a bit and and
and kind of do some fast food.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Every decade we
have to reinvent ourselves.
You know. So. So the chefs bylaw.
So this. Yeah. So this decade is,
you know become more of. Like a vegan.
You know, our vegan fast food.
We're trying to.
I'm trying to save the planet,
like one meal at a time.
One fast, faster, one at a time.
And and and as we go into
this butternut squash dish,
which which which by the
way he grew those squashes.
Yeah. These are grown in Durham kind of.
We're going here. We're gonna
hear more about that in a second.
Go ahead. You start working.
I'll ask a couple of questions
along the way. We're doing a
butternut squash almond bisque.
Is that it? That's right.
Squash almond bisque.
Been making this for over 30 years. And
you know you have the recipe.
You can make this at home.
It's very easy to make.
Pink, pink A1, decent sized butternut squash.
And then we have onions,
carrots and celery that we're going
to saute and you're just
gonna saute that squash as as.
And if you notice it's already diced
up pretty finely, which means it's
gonna cook pretty quickly. Sure, right.
You just Add all your veg. You say.
That's a different kind of Holy Trinity.
There you got it almost looks like carrots,
but it's not. Yeah.
We call this the mere Paas,
carrots, celery and onions.
Talk about, talk about the
transition from Jizan to G monkey.
You had your you had your G.
Truck, you had a food truck going
on and that was a huge success.
Simple dishes. Yeah. Simpler dishes.
It's more geared for fast food.
Sure. Quick, you know,
quick pick up that we have seeds
so you can come in and sit down.
Right. But here's the thing.
And I've and I've been a big
proponent of this for a long time
just because if you're on the run,
if you gotta go to fast food,
you can still eat healthy.
And that's got to be the, the,
the big draw of Joe Monkey
up in West Hartford because,
you know people who are in a hurry,
you don't have to go through
a drive through somewhere.
You can get to you.
Even better meal at your place.
Right.
You can get a great meal here.
Yes right and we're not you know
obviously now we're in West
Hartford so we have a bigger
population to draw from right.
A lot of people we ohh but your
name people are traveling well we
had the food truck we've had the
you know the food truck was coming
to Hartford Stillings forage and
around Hartford for 10 years.
Sure.
So now we're stationary up there
we've how long is this gonna we're
gonna cook this until it starts
to brown you can stir it and then
we're going to add we're going to
add our butternut squash to this.
OK. All right, your carrots.
And now here comes the butternut squash.
And then we're gonna add a little
bit of our basil.
And our salt and pepper,
you were talking about you you grew
these yourself little cinnamon and I
think you said something interesting
during the commercial break.
I don't I have mixed results with garden.
I'm better with flowers.
But you said you could you can grow
better in those squashes just about
butter that's easy to grow in Connecticut.
How come it's just it takes it's
kind of like growing arugula.
Anyone can do it.
If you have a little plot of land
that eat a small little garden.
Does the soil matter?
I mean it's it's always better to
have good soil but it it's pretty
it's a pretty hearty plant right
and just three months beginning to.
And you, you've got,
you have nice butternut squash you can use.
You can use, you know,
a scoop like this to scoop. Ohh.
I'd use my hands. Is that wrong?
Scoop it out.
I mean I wouldn't do that if I were
running a restaurant, but in my kitchen.
And then you wash these and
put them on a plate, dry them.
Then you have seeds for the next year.
I love that.
So when you go to a farmers market
and you get some of these other squashes,
you can try to do that the same way.
Save your seat, barter. Yeah.
I'll give you a good seeds
if you hook me up with some
arugula and then everybody went.
Longer we are. Are we alright?
So now we're gonna add our vegetable
stock to this.
Mm-hmm.
And these are just,
these are just
basically some of the scraps that I
used when I was prepping my carrots,
onion, celery, and rush so we
could stir that up, keep stirring.
And then once this boils, this is going
to simmer for about 20 minutes or so.
And then we take our trusty hand
blender and puree it with a
little bit of our almond butter.
OK, let's talk about that almond butter.
We're gonna do some more stuff than just the.
Yeah. We have a couple other things to
do to add to this when it's done right.
OK, go for that. OK, so we have,
and this is going to be our finished product,
which is here, right?
But we also have a cashew Parmesan.
Let's talk about that.
Because, you know,
when I hear cashew and I know what are we?
We're talking cheese that's
made with cashews, right? Yeah.
Alright. How do we do? Yeah.
These aren't soaked or anything.
These are raw,
unsalted cashews and we put
them in our trusty Cuisinart,
right.
And we add a little bit of nutritional
here to throw them in there and
make some noise. All right,
we'll make some noise. Anywhere you you
gotta, we'll add our nutritional yeast.
What what are we throwing in there?
Nutritional. This is nutritional yeast, OK,
which is a yeast that's grown on molasses.
It has a lot of B12.
It's a complete protein. Ohh.
So a lot of a lot of vegans will use this.
And by the way,
if you're thinking well where the heck am
I gonna get that any natural food store
is gonna have any natural food store.
You know I like to support the
small independent ones.
But there's any natural food store
we'll have it had pulse set, all right.
And so it's going to make a little noise.
Ohh. It's not plugged in.
We can imagine. Alright, for those
of you don't know what it's like,
it's like this. Doesn't matter.
Yeah, loud noise. And this
is our finished product.
OK but now so this is part
I mean it looks like Parmesan cheese
clearly plate this all up when it
because it all comes together right.
Ohh yeah so this is we're gonna add we're
gonna do one more recipe OK as well but
yeah it all comes together and this is
a great you could put this on pasta on
salads on soups so it's a great way to
incorporate some nuts into your diet.
I'm betting the last quickie that we're
gonna do all this stuff right here right.
Yeah the last thing we're gonna do is
we're gonna add come on over here don't
don't be shy go we're going to add our.
We have, we have tamari.
What do we got here?
We have tamari, liquid smoke.
Put a little Maple syrup in there
just a little bit or the whole thing,
just a tablespoon or so.
That's good. Yeah.
OK and then we're going to add our
liquid smoke and then you're going
to add a pinch of the paprika.
God, I saw all that.
Just so you know, I saw this.
I went, if that's going in, all that.
Now, this is paprika.
But if you have a recipe, it's not cayenne.
If you have a recipe for smoked paprika,
right.
All you can do is put regular
paprika on a little sheet pan.
Put that in quickly,
put it in the
oven. Hmm. And then and then
you have smoked paprika.
So then we have our we have our coconut,
which is a raw big flake coconut,
and you just stir this up.
And then stir this up right,
and we're going to put it onto a
sheet pan, roast that for how long,
and we put it in the oven for 5 minutes.