Archive for September, 2008

First Fall Flavors = Soup

September 29, 2008 at 3:08 pm · Filed under Food, vegan ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that after only two and a half weeks at my job, I was laid off.  More than not having income, the bad part is that this will hold up our progress on finding a place to live.  We’re tired of being homeless!

The good news is that while I’m looking for a job (again) I’ll have time to cook.  For the past few weeks I’ve started to notice the pumpkins and fall produce in stores, unable to make anything with them.  I feel like I’ve been missing out on a whole season’s worth of produce.  In reality, it’s only been a few weeks and I’m just being dramatic.

I’m sure we’ve all had creamy butternut squash soups, but I was craving it bigtime so soup is what you get.  I think this one was pretty special though, as three certified meat eating boys all agreed that it was quite tasty.

Roasted Garlic, Butternut Squash and Carrot Soup with Caramelized Onions

1 medium butternut squash, seeded, peeled and diced into 1-inch cubes
3/4 lb (12 oz) baby carrots
8 cloves garlic, peeled
olive oil
1 large sweet onion, sliced thinly
3 cups vegetable broth
1/2 tsp curry powder
1/4 tsp coriander
1/4 tsp turmeric
dash cayenne pepper
kosher salt
freshly ground black pepper
paprika

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Place squash, carrots and garlic on a roasting pan covered with aluminum foil. Drizzle on a few Tbs olive oil and stir to coat. Cook for 25 minutes, stirring once after 15 minutes. Let cool.
2. Meanwhile, heat 1 Tbs olive in a large pot. Add sliced onion and turn heat to low. Cook onions, stirring frequently, until soft and caramelized, 30 minutes or more. Remove onions from the pot.
3. Transfer half the roasted vegetables to a blender, add half of the broth and puree. Pour into the pot used to cook the onions. Put the other half of the vegetables and broth in the blender and add most of the caramelized onions, reserving a few for garnish. Puree and pour into the pot.
4. Add the seasonings (curry powder through cayenne pepper), stir, and heat soup until warmed through. Add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Garnish each bowl with caramelized onions, paprika and more black pepper.

Makes 5-6 servings as a side.

While you’re at it, why not roast some brussel sprouts?

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Party Food & Searching for the Perfect Pancake, Part 3

September 14, 2008 at 10:13 pm · Filed under Food, vegan ·Tagged , , , , ,

Last weekend was bf’s birthday, and one of his cousins invited a whole lot of people over to his place to celebrate.  We were going to order the UFC fight and watch some college football, and wanted to keep the food simple and on the cheap side since we were expecting quite the crowd.  As usual, I contributed because I like sharing, and also to make sure I didn’t starve.

Layered bean dip:  refried beans, avocado mashed with lime juice, salsa, better than cream cheese with taco seasoning, lettuce, green onion and olives.  I guess technically it was a seven layer dip.  This was a hit, gone by the end of the night.  Many people asked me what the ingredients were and were surprised to hear there was a vegan cream cheese.

I also brought the ubiquitous veggie tray, with Trader Joe’s Tuscan Italian dressing.

BF doesn’t really like cake.  I mean, he’ll eat it sometimes if it’s there, but I wanted to make something I knew he would like a lot, so I went with a cookie cake.  Since my kitchen is still packed in boxes I used storebought frosting and didn’t go crazy decorating.  It wasn’t nearly as nice as the one I made for the superbowl (buried somewhere in this post…bf’s birthday cake from a couple years ago is at the very bottom too, that one was impressive.  and time consuming.), but it tasted great just the same.

It’s just the VWAV chocolate chip cookie recipe with a tad extra liquid, pressed onto a cookie sheet, baked and covered in icing.  It couldn’t get much easier.  People go nuts for cookie cake.

On Monday I started my new job in San Francisco, which unfortunately involves up to three hours of commuting every day.  It also involves staying in people’s spare rooms and on their floors since we don’t have a place to live yet.  This situation may or may not change in the near future, but for now my food during the week is mostly prepared due to time constraints, tiredness, and not wanting to mess other people’s kitchens up.  I took my camera with me and meant to document a few of the meals, however boring, but when it came down to it I just didn’t have the energy to take pictures.  When I finally got “home” at the end of the day I just wanted to eat ASAP.  So unfortunately I have no pictures of canned split pea soup, Amy’s roasted veggie pizza, salad from a salad bar, or a taco salad from Whole Foods hot bar that cost me over $11.  You know what all that stuff looks like anyway.  The food highlight of my week was a vegan blueberry donut from Whole Foods.  I LOVE blueberry donuts.  I used to buy blueberry and cherry donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts back in the day.  This one wasn’t quite the same, but it definitely hit the spot.  Blue frosting and all.

Having not been able to cook all week, yesterday I woke up with the urge to make something.  Lazy Saturday mornings equal pancakes to me, so I continued my quest to find the perfect vegan pancake.  Refer to these postsfor my first two attempts.  This time I went with the recommended Diner Style Pancakes from the Candle Cafe Cookbook.  I don’t have any of my normal egg replacers here though, so I had to tweak the recipe a little and use a tablespoon cornstarch mixed with a tablespoon of water in place of the egg replacer the recipe calls for.

I put chocolate chips in some of them just because I could.  These reminded me of my results using the VWAV pancake recipe – they tasted great, but were still flat.  I’m not giving up on this recipe completely though, since I did change it up a little.  I’ll try it again, maybe with a bit less liquid for a less runny batter.

BF and two of his cousins were making breakfast too, since football starts at 10AM over here.  They were planning chorizo and egg burritos, and I was going to stick with pancakes for simplicity’s sake.  But bf called me from the grocery store asking if I wanted some vegetarian chorizo that he had spotted.  He’s become really great at looking out for me and my food needs.  So while they cooked up theirs, I “scrambled” my veggie chorizo with tofu and spices.

Not exactly picturesque, but it was tasty.  Very similar to tvp or tempeh sausage crumbles that I’ve made before, a little spicy.  Except the chorizo comes in a casing like the real stuff, and you squeeze it out of the casing into the pan.  It seems to me it would be easier to just package it without the casing, but I guess they’re going for authenticity.  The soy flavor was a little overwhelming since it was TVP and tofu, so I think next time I would maybe try it with beans or on its own.

We also roasted home fries.  Here is my resulting delicious breakfast that kept me stuffed for a very long time.

Very early tomorrow morning I’m back to the grind, commuting and eating from a can.  Until next weekend…

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My First Sushi

September 4, 2008 at 4:49 pm · Filed under Food, vegan ·Tagged ,

My first homemade sushi, that is.  BF and I have been wanting to try our hand at sushi making for quite a while, so we finally bit the bullet and bought the supplies.  I kept the fillings simple, and tried a few different kinds of sushi.

Overall it wasn’t that difficult.  The rolls came together okay even without the use of a bamboo mat, but it turned out our knives weren’t very sharp.  My rolls got pretty mangled when I tried to cut them, but I kind of squeezed each piece back together, and they held together alright with chopsticks.

Everything tasted good, but I think my favorite was the nigiri in the middle.  I’m a sucker for white rice but try to choose brown more often, so the huge bites of seasoned rice were really good.

The second best part of homemade sushi?  Leftovers = sushi bowl!  Or sushi tupperware, as it were.

We had fun playing with our food, and will definitely attempt sushi again in the near future.

On a side note, I bought a ticket to the VegNews Vegan a Go-Go Book Bash on October 3rd.  I also plan on going to World Veg Festival Weekend on October 4th or 5th.  Anybody else plan on going to either?

On another side note, I got a job!  BF has some second interviews going on, so hopefully soon we’ll be looking for a place to live and I can get back to my regularly scheduled life.  I’m pretty excited, and also pretty overwhelmed.  I have to remember to take everything one step at a time, and getting a job was the first very important step.

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Playing With Produce

September 2, 2008 at 2:08 pm · Filed under Food, vegan ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

A couple weeks ago I was gifted some produce – some monster produce.  I’m not sure there’s anything better than free produce from someone’s garden.  It’s home grown, local, and most importantly, free.  This bag o’ veggies included what might be the world’s largest zucchini, seen here with a “normal” zucchini for comparison.

I had been abstaining from baking since the kitchen here isn’t really set up for it, but what’s a girl to do with a huge zucchini, especially with a fantasy football draft and a PPK meetup that weekend?  Make chocolate zucchini muffins, that’s what.  I found some great looking recipes online, but I wanted to keep the ingredient list to a minimum since I’d have to buy everything new, right down to flour.  So I settled on this recipe, which is actually a brownie recipe.  I figured if they tasted good in a pan surely they would also taste good in muffin form.  Problem was, the batter didn’t come together at all.  There wasn’t nearly enough liquid, it was kind of like a big lump of chocolate sugar and flour, which really isn’t that bad…but it wasn’t bakeable.  So I added just over a cup of soy milk (I had doubled the recipe), and lo and behold they baked up pretty well.  They weren’t exactly brownie-ish and they weren’t exactly muffin-ish, but they were mighty tasty.

I had more batter than the pans would hold, and I was just going to keep it in the fridge to eat raw later (ah, they joys of eggless batter), but I decided to see if it would bake up after sitting around for a half hour.  Sure did!  The second batch even had nicely rounded tops.

At the aforementioned PPK meetup I got to try golden watermelon!  I have a slight aversion to regular watermelon for reasons we won’t discuss here, but this golden watermelon was great.  I’m glad I got to try it.  (Look at that beautiful grass!  There were geese all over the park too.)

Back to the veggie present.  Here’s the rest of what I got, along with the remainder of the zucchini.

With these goodies I made ratatouille, which I had never tried before.  It was good but a little bland, so I added a splash of balsamic at the end and that did the trick.  Served with chickpeas over whole wheat couscous.

BF had an interview in San Francisco on Tuesday, and I remembered that there was a farmers market at the Ferry Building on Tuesdays.  Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.  I spent about an hour walking around and looking at everything, and ended up with all this for $23!  Whole wheat pain au levaine, bell peppers, long beans, baby bok choy, fresh tofu, hot banana pepper, white nectarine, dapper dandy pluot, salad mix, purslane and radishes in the bag, and fingerling potatoes.

I didn’t set out with anything in mind because I wanted to try some new things, but a few meals came together as I went along.  Dinner that night was a salad that I wasn’t entirely certain would work.  Fortunately it came together fantastically.

Salad mix, purslane, lentils, roasted radishes, red and purple peppers and grapes with goddess dressing.  The sweet and savory with the contrast of textures was right on.  Plus, anything tastes good with goddess dressing.  A word on roasting radishes:  They’re really good, try it!  Just don’t cut the pieces too small as they shrink a lot while cooking.

Here’s what purslane looks like, if you’ve never seen it.  It’s supposedly really good for you, high in vitamins and omega-3’s.  I liked it raw but have also heard of people sauteing it.  It’s hard to describe the flavor.  There’s definitely a strong flavor, but it’s not bitter like arugula.

The next meal from my farmers market greatness was tofu scramble with the hot banana pepper, red bell pepper and zucchini, steamed long beans (cut into shorter beans), and roasted fingerling potatoes.  I knew I’d love the fingerlings.  BF said they were kind of like homemade french fries.  The outsides toughens up while the insides stay nice and soft.

And lastly, a “what do I have left in the fridge?” meal, braised sesame eggplant and baby bok choy.  This was just okay.  My Chinese-style food always seems to be lacking just a bit in the flavor department.  I like to think it’s because I don’t use msg.

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