GREENS SOUP

GREENS SOUP

1 medium onion, chopped
1 large celery stalk, chopped
1 potato (about 6 ounces), scrubbed and diced
1/2 cup red lentils, picked and rinsed
2 bay leaves
4 cups water
1 zucchini (about 7 ounces), diced
1-1/2 - 2 cups fresh broccoli, chopped small
1 - 10 ounce pack frozen spinach, defrosted
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or to taste)
1 tsp ground cumin
salt and pepper to taste

In a large pot, put the onion, celery, potato and lentils with the water and bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer covered for about 20 minutes. Remove the bay leaves.(You need to do this because the soup will later be blended.) The potatoes and and vegetables and lentils will be softish.

Add the zucchini, broccoli, spinach, basil, cayenne, cumin and salt/pepper (if used) and return to the boil, lower heat and simmer covered for another 10 minutes or until the broccoli and spinach are cooked.

In batches, blend the soup in a blender until smooth. Return to the pan, reheat gently and adjust water content if needed (it may have become very thick). Taste for seasoning. Garnish as you please - as you see, I put aside a couple of spoonsful of the cooked veggies before blending so that I could add them to the soup as garnish. Frankly, I don't think it helps much except to advertise (to those who didn't see you make it) what's in the soup :) Accompany with breads of your choice - we chose our stand-by homemade sourdough last evening.

Slow Week, But Lots Of 'Tries'

This is a slow week for this blog, mainly because we are caught up in something else right now. But we have been trying new recipes - just not actually created anything new to pass on.

What you might like to try, though, is a lovely soup from Barnard's La Dolce Vegan - Curried Ginger Butternut Squah Soup - which takes all the usual suspects plus potato and butternut squash, with some fresh grated ginger - a humungous two inches of it, which I loved when I saw it - to give it that certain zip and flavour. It was perfect the way it was - with maybe a little more (okay, quite a little) garam masala than called for (but I'd used my own mix not her recipe for that, so that could be the reason). Very highly recommended.


Still working at cooking fat free (not had to cheat yet), my dh tried out a Red Lentil Curry by Jennifer Raymond (again!) from Neal Barnard's Turn Off The Fat Genes. It was lovely, so much so indeed that I think we ate rather more of it than our fair share. Fortunately it is low in calories.


We also collaborated in an adaptation of a Barnard & Kramer banana bread - it's wonderful, with three bananas for ultimate banana flavour and lots of chopped dates. You can find that one in How It All Vegan. It's terribly decadent in taste, but we cheated the original recipe a bit by switching the oil for another half a banana (why not!). We couldn't see any difference from the way it had turned out when we had made it before using oil, so why add such stuff in there! It's a 'good any time of day' bread/cake or what you will! Once we even followed one of their options and added carob chips to the recipe, but it was much more of a dessert then than we had in mind. Delicious though. A bread worth cultivating, I'd say.

Meanwhile, I have today made a very nice cornbread, but that story will have to wait for another time!

MUSHROOM BISQUE

This is a lovely soup which we have had twice now - and it is so simple to make. It is an adaptatiion of one in Leah Leneman's The Tofu Cookbook (1992,1998). I can't think how I overlooked it for so long!

MUSHROOM BISQUE

1 medium onion, finely chopped
3/4 lb. mushrooms, finely chopped
1 Tbsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
2-1/2 cups (20 fl. oz.) water
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 lb (1 cup) soft tofu
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

'Saute' the onion and mushrooms in a little water with the paprika and cayenne, bring to a boil and lower to simmer. Cover and cook until the vegetables soften - about 10 minutes. (Don't let this boil dry.)

Add the water, salt (if using) and pepper. Stir. Bring to boil and reduce to simmer for another 3 minutes.

Now your soup is almost ready. Put the tofu and lemon juice in a blender amd zap it into creamy mix, which you will now stir into the mushroom mixture. Heat very gently, not permitting it to come to the boil.


Taste for seasoning and adjust if needed. Serve immediately. Wonderful!

[NOTE: You could of course use vegetable stock in place of the water, but I decided not to do that for fear of overpowering the flavour of the mushrooms. I used just plain button mushrooms, but I plan to experiment with a mix for next time.]

Serves 4.

Crockpot Ratatouille, Chickpea Patties With Sauce

I'm a little behind with a couple of items for this blog, so some of these entries today will be a bit, er, disordered. But here goes! My husband and I decided to make Ratatoille again the other day (Thursday? Yes, it was.) - it's such a useful way of eating all one's favourite veggies at once and having wonderful leftovers to use for something else. It works fine chilled or at room temp too, if it lasts that long :)

Anyway, this time I made a double amount and added some lovely basil to the mix. I was going to be busy so popped it into my slow cooker for around three hours on high. It quite filled up my cooker, but by the time the veggies were tender, it had shrunk down nicely, as you see here.

The addition I made was a small can of tomato paste (mine says 5.5 ounces) which I stired in at that point. It looked great and smelled even better.

Of course, that left me with a slight problem of what to put with it - so I raided the refrigerator and found some cooked chickpeas left over from a batch of hummous. Hmmmmm. chickpeas with - what? I mashed the chickpeas with a potato masher (just over a cup of the little honeys), zapped some wholewheat bread in the mini-processor to produce around 3 Tbsp crumbs, ditto a chunk of zucchini to produce ca. 3 Tbsp grated zucchini. I added two finely chopped green onions, a dash of hot sauce, a spritz of Braggs, a sprinkle of sage, a grind of black pepper and bound it all together with a flax 'egg'. I think that was it. [EDIT: I forgot to say I added a sprinkle of raisins! Sorry.]

Formed into patties they browned in my cast-iron pan (with just a quick spray of cooking oil/Pam). I thought they looked a little naked, so I heated up a few tablespoons of the last of my Roasted Red Pepper Pasta Sauce from Wednesday.

By the time the flavour of the tomato paste had melded nicely with the ratatouille, thickening it nicely, the go-withs were ready. A quick green salad quickly thrown together, and we were ready to eat. Somehow, however, the plates didn't get a chance to get photographed!

My husband didn't think the sauce on the patties was needed, though, and I agree. Overkill.

CARROT AND ROASTED PEPPER SOUP

While I was still using up those jarred red peppers (they did go a long way - good value!), I made this soup a few days ago. It was surprisingly good - and I'm not a big fan of carrots. The recipe is adapted from one by Jennifer Raymond in Neal Barnard’s Eat Right, Live Longer, changed for a quick and easy version with a little more zip.

CARROT AND ROASTED PEPPER SOUP

1/2 yellow cooking onion, chopped
3/4 pound peeled baby carrots, chopped
2 cups water
3 or 4 roasted red peppers from a jar
2 cups low-fat soymilk
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
dash cayenne
freshly ground black pepper to taste
salt to taste

Cook the onions and carrots in a saucepan with the water until carrots are done (15-20 minutes, depending on how large the pieces of carrot are).

In batches, put the contents of this saucepan into a blender with the roasted peppers and a little of the soymilk so that it blends easily.

Return the blended carrots, onions and pepper puree to the pan along with the rest of the soymilk if not all used in blending. If soup looks too thick (depends on how much cooking liquid you had left in that pan), add a little water to get it to the desired consistency, but soup should be thick and creamy still.

Add the balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, cayenne, pepper and salt, stir well, reheat and serve.

Serves 4.

RYE BREAD

My latest attempt at rye bread turned out much better than others, I am happy to report! (Did I ever confess that I'm not all that good at making rye bread? It's usually far too heavy.) However, this time, I seem to have got the mix of flours, the kneading time and the rising time - and no doubt the congruency of the stars and/or the weather and my mood had something to do with it - pretty well spot on.

I made a single loaf:

1 Tbsp yeast
1-1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1-1/2 cups rye flour
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbsp wheat gluten
1 tsp fennel seeds
3/4 tsp aniseed
1 Tbsp molasses (mixed in with a little of the water)
water - oh I dunno, about 1-1/2 cups I think

I did the usual things - put the yeast to rise in the right degree of warmth of water with a little flour and a pinch of sugar until it showed it was going to work. I sifted together the dry ingredients and then (I tend to do breadmaking backwards, and if I try to reverse it and do it in the conventional way I get a flop) added the yeast mix to the dry ingredients and added the water and molasses and then more water, mixing it with my hands, until it looked as if it was starting to form a good kneadable dough.

I turned the glom of flour and water etc. onto a lightly floured board and kneaded it for 10 minutes, let it rest for 10, then kneaded it for another five. (I always time all this, because I either cheat the time or I forget how long I've been playing with it - I get mesmerized by kneading bread!)

When it was beautifully smooth etc, it went into into a lightly oiled/sprayed bowl and was covered with a cloth for 1-1/2 hours, at which time it had doubled in size. I punched it down, kneaded it a bit more and formed into a loaf and set it in its pan, covered again, to rise for around another hour - it had doubled again, or nearly so. Baked for 40 minutes or so at 375F.

But I swear it all has to do with the moisture in the air, outside and inside, the temperature of the kitchen, etc. etc. - and the mood of the breadmaker and/or the yeast.

I have yet to make a rye sourdough. That's another challenge.

Roasted Red Pepper Pasta Sauce

Today I tried a recipe from fatfree.com for a Roasted Red Pepper Pasta Sauce. I had wanted to use up the jar of roasted red peppers I had started a few days ago (for the Rotini, remember? - Rotini with Broccoli & Tomatoes) - and so googled and scouted around a bit. What I found was Mikes roasted red pepper pasta sauce which would use up all but three of what I had left. Made with already-roasted peppers, this was a Quick-and-Easy Fix for lunch.

It took two red bell peppers per person, so for two of use I used 5 of the jarred peppers, plus garlic, onion, sundried tomatoes, herbs and balsamic vinegar. Got all that!

I did as was asked - except my peppers were already roasted - and blended the ingredients, adding in some of the tomato soaking liquid as suggested. heated it and seasoned it and there it was, in no time at all!
It was thick and beautiful and tasted wonderful!

We had it with wholewheat penne and a side salad. A great lunch.