Red River Raw Borscht, Cauliflower Salad, Tomato Plate, Kale and Apple Salad

If you've been reading this blog at all, you know that my dh and I love beets - hot, cold, pickled, in soup, in salads, however they come and the redder the better. Recently I made a raw beet salad - and was absolutely amazed at how good it was. And I have tried a few raw soups with similar success. But raw borscht??? I didn't think so. I did, however find a recipe for a raw borscht with garlic and dill and a cup of soaked-overnight almonds (which would have 'creamed' it), and, of course, cabbage and beets in Brigitte Mars's Rawsome! and thought, well, it can be done. So I turned to my previous variations on conventional cooked borscht, thought of some amendements, and within minutes had a raw version chilling in the refrigerator. My dh pronounced it excellent, and I must say I enjoyed it thoroughly too.

RED RIVER RAW BORSCHT

3/4 pound red beets, peeled and chopped
1 large clove garlic
two large handfuls of fresh spinach (I'd have preferred beet greens, but it's early in the year for that)
1-1/4 cups cranberries (I used some I'd frozen earlier)
zest, juice and chopped flesh of 1 orange (blood orange, if you have it)
4 sundried tomatoes, soaked and chopped (soaking liquid reserved)
large handful dulse, lightly rinsed, chopped (other sea vegetable would be good, but I was keeping with red.)
1-1/2 tsp miso
2 or 3 dashes cayenne (optional, but it gives it a nice extra zip)
enough water to blend the ingredients and to reach the desired consistency

Set a few cranberries aside for garnish, if you wish, and put the rest of the ingredients with the soaking liquid from the dried tomatoes and a cup or more of water into a blender. Puree well, adding more water as needed. Add any extra water to bring to your preferred thickness. Taste for seasoning and adjust. Regrigerate until needed, for a cold soup, or serve at room temperature.

Garnish with cranberries and, if you like, fresh herbs, etc. Serve chilled with freshly ground black pepper.

And - oh yes, the name of the soup? My very first taste of borscht was in the late '40s and came from the kitchen of a lady who had migrated to Manitoba from the Ukraine. The soup was strong (not, I imagine, vegetarian!), chunky, full of many wonderful things, and was like no soup I'd ever eaten before. I loved it! This soup is named in honour of that long-ago hospitality. Thank you, Mrs B.


And now for some raw vegetable dishes we've been enjoying - nothing tricky, nothing fiddly, but all fresh and delicious!




CAULIFLOWER SALAD

This was pretty simple and almost embarrassingly easy, but it was good enough to pass on for a quick and easy dish to add to any array of salads or to have alone with some chunky French bread if you prefer. The addition of the sea vegetable adds a dimension I wouldn't have believed. Lovely :)

1 small head of cauliflower, cut into florets
2 or 3 green/spring onions, cut across into chunky rounds
handful of dulse, lightly rinsed and chopped into small pieces
a couple of handfuls of 'baby' carrots
1 or 2 tsp Bragg's Aminos / All-Purpose Soy Seasoning, or low-sodium soy (not strictly raw)
Zest and juice of one lime

Whisk the last two ingredients together and pour over the vegetables. Toss to lightly flavour all the vegetables with citrus and the soy. Serve with more lime wedges if you wish.


And sometimes the simplest methods sometimes escape me when I'm hassled for time. This is one of those. Tomatoes are great, just sliced and passed at the table, of course. When I'm thinking ahead even half an hour (an hour if I can), however, I like to increase the flavour a little this way (not a great photo or a very classy presentation, but you get the idea):



TOMATO PLATE

1 large tomato or as many as you wish to serve, thinly sliced
2 thin slices of onion, separated into rings or half-rings
sea salt
large handful cilantro, roughly chopped
1 lime
freshly ground black pepper
ground cummin to sprinkle to taste

At least half an hour before serving, sprinkle the tomatoes in a bowl with a little salt, layering with the onion and, if you wish, a little of the chopped cilantro. Squeeze a little lime juice over the lot.

Give the tomato mixture a couple of gentle turns in the bowl during the next half hour or so (being careful not to break up the tomato slices).

Arrange the slices of tomato and onion on a plate, add freshly ground black pepper and a sprinkle or two of ground cummin and the rest of the cilantro. Serve with lime wedges.

Everyone knows how much I love eating kale. It's full of good things, including loads of calcium, but it's also so good in flavour. There are different kinds of kale, but this lovely green curly kale is what is available to me now. I'm always making salads from it these days, and I just vary the ingredients and the seasonings to make it a little different each time.



KALE AND APPLE SALAD

1 head of kale
1 or 2 slices of onion
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 sweet red apple
small handful of raisins
raw cider vinegar, to taste
tsp raw agave syrup
Squeeze of lemon or lime juice to taste
sprinkle of Braggs Aminos, to taste (optional) - or you could use low-sodium soy sauce or tamari
dash or two of cayenne (optional)
freshly ground black pepper to taste

Strip the leaves only from the kale stems, wash, and tear into small pieces and place in a large bowl. 'Massage' these with your hands, deliberately bruising and wilting the leaves for a few minutes, until they take up less volume in the bowl and have turned darker green (as if lightly cooked). Don't worry about overdoing this - this pseudo-cooked texture is nice - taste a little as you go along!

Chop the onion, garlic and add to the kale when it is ready. If you're not going to serve immediately, chop/slice the apple just before adding the dressing - to avoid having the cut apple go brown - or sprinkle it with a little lemon juice meanwhile while it waits. Add the raisins.

Mix together the cider vinegar, agave syrup, lemon or lime juice, Braggs or soy sauce with the cayenne, if using.

Pour this dressing over the rest of the ingredients and toss. Serve in your favourite salad bowl (if you're not already using it!) with other salads or as a first course.

You'd be amazed at how lively we feel with eating so much raw food (although we're not 100 per cent raw - and our condiments are not yet completely raw) - and it certainly saves a lot of time in the kitchen! Next acquisition will be a dehydrator - than watch out!!!!!

RAW BEET SALAD

Here I am, gnawing and crunching away at raw fruits and vegetables - and loving it. I had recently bought a kilogramme of beets ('beetroot' to any of you in the UK and what I used to call them until recently), which we usually cook for salads, soups, other dishes. But I ran across a recipe that suggested one could grate them raw with apple for a salad, then use a raw vegan almond 'mayonnaise' to dress it and sprinkle it with sesame seeds. Simple :) Being me, absolutely determined to pervert the course of true cuisine, however, I went in a slightly different direction:

RAW BEET SALAD

3 Tbsp wakame seaweed, soaked and finely chopped
1/2 kg beets, peeled and grated (I used a food processor attachment to my wand blender to do mine)
1/2 kg apples, peeled and grated
1 Tbsp white miso
1 Tbsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos / All-Purpose Liquid Soy Seasoning (instead of Tamari, which I'm sure would taste fine)
handful of Italian parsley
good pinch of cayenne
ginger root (your choice how much), finely chopped
squeeze or two of lemon (optional)
salt and peppe (if needed) to taste
GARNISH: sesame seeds (optional - but they look pretty against the colours of the

Throw all into your blender, except for the garnish. Chill and serve with those sesame seeds if you like. Good food.

NOTE: the dressing (everything except the first three ingredients and the garnish) is entirely up to you. We love to use seaweeds in salads and soups and anything else we can stick them into - or much them on our own, but if you don't care for them (have you TRIED them all? Wunnerful!), then by all means skip.

Cranberry Borscht, Cranberry Bread, Eggplant & Okra Stew, green salad

CRANBERRY BORSCHT

This recipe is such a hit here that we have made huge batches of it twice now and can see no way of improving it. It comes straight from Finlayson's 125 Best Vegetarian Slow Cooker Recipes - with the difference that, for some reason or other, we have always made it on top of the stove instead.

Here you see it, returned to a pan to reheat a portion for the two of us after being blended. So rich and creamy! And that colour!!!!!

What is different and nice about Finlayson's recipe is that instead of cabbage it uses the greens of the beets you use for the soup. No other vegetables, barring garlic, are added, but cranberries, orange and orange zest, etc., instead. Look it up - it's a winner!!!

Oh - I should add that once we didn't have the beet greens to go with the beets ;) so we used chard instead. It was also very good, and okay to remember in a pinch, but the use of beet greens is something I've not run across before (all my borscht recipes have used cabbage) and it's a real treat in this recipe. I haven't found a recipe in here that I haven't loved!

CRANBERRY BREAD



This bread comes from Sarah Kramer's excellent La Dolce Vegan! and is called there 'Jen's Raisin Soda Bread'. The use of cranberries instead of raisins and the addition of orange zest is a suggested variant. Otherwise, it is a standard soda bread (but the best recipe I have tried for it!) with caraway seeds. Absolutely delicious! We've made it twice now and it is absolutely no-fail.



EGGPLANT & OKRA STEW

Again this recipe started out to be another one entirely, but really I rarely follow a recipe (except for baking - and not always then) and I like to use what I have in the refrigerator and cupboards - unless of course it's for something special. I had a large eggplant and I had green bell pepper - and some frozen okra, a large can of tomatoes. Sounded like a stew to me, and so it was.

In a hurry as always, I cut the eggplant into smallish pieces and didn't bother with sweating and draining it first.

1 onion, chopped
1 large eggplant, chopped into 1-inch or less pieces
1-1/2 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp oregano
1 large can low-sodium tomatoes (28 ounces)
1 Tbsp Annie's vegan Worcestershire Sauce
1/2 tsp crushed dried red chilies
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
freshly ground black pepper
1 pkg (10 ounces) frozen okra, thawed and trimmed and cut into 3/4-inch pieces
1 green bell pepper, diced

Cook onion in a little wataer until softened in a pot large enough to hold everything. Add all but the last two ingredients and bring back to the boil, reduce heat and cook until nearly done. Be careful not to overcook the eggplant - you don't want mush. Add the okra and bell pepper and cook until just done - these should still give a little resistance to the bite. Taste for seasoning and serve with your favourite grain, alone, or with a crusty bread.

And here's a quick photo of the salad we had too - my little bit of propaganda just in case it converts one more person to eating salads too! ;)

Beet & Apple Salad With Avocado, Red Quinoa & Lentil Medley, Tofu Red & Green Pepper Stirfry

BEET & APPLE SALAD WITH AVOCADO

[Edited to correct seasonings, etc.]

This salad was the star of the meal, I think, and appropriately we almost always have our salad first these days. (Okay, we used to always follow our main course with a salad course, and that's how I still stubbornly have pictured them in this blog, but lately, well, we have switched back to the North American custom. But don't hold me to it!!!! LOL

I took the time to slice three or four small cooked beets (we were making soup with the rest) and marinate them in garlic, a mix of vinegars (I think I used rice vinegar, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, but cider vinegar might have been there instead of the red wine - I winged it!), 1 tsp or a little more of Dijon mustard, and some pepper (I generally use a mix of red, black, green which I grind fresh). Then the rest was simple, as you see. Some lovely greens on each plate, a few sliced onion shreds on top of them, and sliced red apple (sprinkled with a little lemon juice to keep them fresh looking) and then the beets arranged with avocado over it all. The marinade from the beets - a lovely thick red mixture - I spooned over the top. Simple and delicious.

RED QUINOA AND LENTIL MEDLEY

To follow, we had a 'medley' of some leftover plain cooked red quinoa (so pretty) plus some leftover lentils (previously cooked with herbs, onion, celery and carrot in the Tuscan style) and a few extra vegetables that were hanging around the crisper - celery, no doubt, onion, crushed dried chilies, etc. (I forget exactly - it was nearly a week ago). The vegetables cooked first in a little water in a skillet, the lentils and quinoa to follow with, I think, a Tbsp low sodium soysauce and/or a Tbsp Annie's Organic Vegan Worcestershire Sauce. Very pretty, very tasty - and very nutritious too I suppose ;)

And to accompany it -

TOFU AND RED & GREEN PEPPER STIRFRY



But of course we don't 'fry' but steam or water-'sautee' the vegetables. The tofu was marinated in a Tbsp low-sodium soy sauce, minced garlic, minced ginger, minced red chilies, then added to the 'stirfry' at the end, just to heat through. (Tofu doesn't need to be 'cooked'.) Celery, onion, ginger root, garlic, red and green pepper, etc., were the vegetables that day. Maybe mushrooms too - I usually do something with mushrooms whenever I find the excuse - just love them and always have a bag of them in the fridge.

BORSCHT (Russian Beet and Cabbage Soup)

It is the long simmering which makes this simple recipe especially good. It can also be served chilled, of course. Although borscht (of which this is a version) is not usually pureed, this makes it extra special and suitable for family or dinner party fare. Surprisingly, this also freezes well.

BORSCHT (Russian Beet and Cabbage Soup)

750 g (1-1/2 lb) raw beet/beetroot, peeled and diced OR same of cooked*
1 small cabbage, thinly sliced
1/2 small carrot, chopped
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 onions, chopped
1.5 litres (2-1/2 pints or 6 US cups) vegetable stock (homemade if you
have it)
sea salt to taste (depending on the salitiness of your stock)
freshly ground black pepper
1-1/2 Tbsp vinegar (taste carefully as you add it)
vegan yoghurt or vegan sour 'creme' for garnish
grated cucumber for garnish

Put all the vegetables in a large pan and add the stock. Bring to the
boil and simmer for 2 hours. (You could also do this in a crockpot or slow
cooker.)

Put the soup in a blender in batches, season with salt and pepper and
add a Tbsp of vinegar, then another half Tbsp depending on your taste. Reheat
gently, garnish with the 'creme' and grated cucumber. Serves 6.

*If you are lazy like me, you may want to boil beets up one day - to use
for another dish - and reserve the amount of beets needed for this soup.
In that case, I like to boil the beets in their skins and then plunge them into
cold water. That way the skins just slip off - far less trouble and less
mess. Then you can add the cooked beets to the other ingredients as above.
The soup is good either way.

Enjoy!