Soup's On!

This round in the kitchen produced not only the soup I'm about to talk about, but it also produced the excess butternut squash that I froze and later accidentally ate in my trash can magic smoothie. Soup, like a smoothie, is a surefire way to use up anything you have languishing in the fridge taking up space and working on growing a mold coat. The following recipe is very, very loosely based upon a recipe from "How it All Vegan", but about the only commonalities it has with said recipe is the use of butternut squash, ginger, and tomatoes. I change quantities and ingredients up every time. I prefer the flexibility of cooking over the chemistry and rigidity of baking for this very reason.
These guys were about two pounds each, but a scant two pounds. I used one for the soup and froze the other for later. I will go ahead and admit that more than half my time preparing food is spent washing and slicing/chopping/dicing/peeling vegetables, and I know that is precisely what prevents more people from cooking with fresh veggies. It is *so* worth it to have them fresh though- and they're cheaper, most of the time, than frozen or canned.
That being said, I do love canned beans. Making dry beans is not hard, but it does require some forethought. And sometimes when I come home and want to make a quick chili or stew, it is a little kitchen miracle to have cans of beans at my beck and call in the pantry. Another bonus- since I don't have a ceramic spoon holder thing-y on my stove, the empty can doubles as a spoon holder before finding its home in the recycling bin.
Into this pot I dumped about two cups of butternut squash, liberal amounts of fresh grated and dried ground ginger, a can of fire roasted tomatoes+ the juice, carrots, a can of great northern beans, a splash of coconut milk, some cumin and cardamom, water to cover, salt/pepper/cayenne to taste, and about two cups of very finely chopped kale.
Here it is, about to be devoured. Here's a tip- this soup was delicious and flavorful with a complex depth of spices. And I didn't use one bit of veggie stock. Chicken stock adds a great depth of flavor to soups and casseroles (from what I remember), but to me all veggie stock does is add a salty/celery-y taste- even when I've gone to the trouble of making my own, I don't feel it's worth it, taste wise. So if a recipe calls for veggie stock, try it with water instead. You probably won't notice and it's far easier than making your own, and cheaper than buying it.
I rounded out this meal with herb biscuits. I found a basic herb bread recipe somewhere (I cannot at all remember) and then modified it to the point where its mother wouldn't even recognize it. Some mods-I cut out the sugar, oil, and nuts, upped the flour, added ground flax seed, doubled the recommended spices, added rosemary and roasted garlic pieces, and used coconut milk from a can for some fat. As I said above, baking does not often lend itself well to improvisation, so I tried to replace what I took out as best I could with complementary substitutes. In the end, these were very, very good. The next day we had them for breakfast with vegan breakfast sausage patties and jalapeno jelly. They were a bit crumbly in a good way, like old fashioned buttermilk biscuits. For a long time I would make quick breads in my loaf pan, but they would go stale before Bobby and I could eat them. Now I almost always make them in my muffin pans so that they are easier to store and to transport. Freezing is kinder to them in muffin form as well.

It's worth it to find some good staple quick bread recipes you can easily tinker with- I could just as easily have gone the other route and made these sweet instead of savory by adding in fruit and different spices. If you Google "quick bread recipes" you'll get thousands of results, or you can just click this link to go to an entire section on quick breads from AllRecipes.com.

Trash Can Magic Smoothie

I think bananas have some sort of magical property when blended smoothie style. They can simultaneously mask certain things- kale, spinach, chunks of broccoli- while stepping aside and graciously amplifying the flavors of other things- a dollop of peanut butter, a swirl of coconut milk, a handful of berries. Knowing the magical properties of bananas was what convinced me that the following smoothie would actually be edible. Plus, it allows me to use up all sorts of bits and bobs in my fridge.

I had about 1/4 a cup of pureed organic pumpkin along with about 1/4 a cup of unsweetened, organic, full fat coconut milk leftover from other kitchen endeavors during the week. Respectively those two items are not the most thrifty of ingredients, and I was loathe to waste them. So I threw them in with about 1/4 a cup of blueberries, a tbsp each of ground flax seeds and chia seeds, a splash of almond milk, and the crucial ingredient that would make it all awesome- an overripe, but still very magical, banana.

I also threw in what I *thought* were frozen peaches from our CSA...

Those orange chunks at the bottom were, presumably, peaches. I ground it all up, drank it down, and it tasted fantastic. It wasn't until the next night, when Bobby went to make a fruit crumble (mmmm, crumble) when he held up the jar of presumed peaches and said "wait, what are these? cantaloupe, or... what?". I quickly said "they're peaches" and then realized, as soon as I did, no, no they were not peaches. They were, in fact, chunks of butternut squash that I had peeled and chopped about a week before so that I could make on of my favorite soups of all time quickly.

Moral of the story, the magical properties of bananas have been MORE than confirmed. Butternut squash is delicious in a smoothie with such unlikely blend fellows as blueberries and pumpkin puree. That has to be magic, folks.

Cardamommmm mmmm mmmm

Cardamom has to be, hands down, one of my favorite spices. It doesn't get a lot of play in the typical cook's rotation, but I'm apt to sneak it into lots of random things- including my smoothies from time to time. We had some CSA plums that had been cleaned, sliced, pitted, and frozen, but I didn't want them to languish too long in the depths of our personal kitchen tundra because I hate to waste the freshness of fruit by freezing it and letting it get all ice-furry and frost bitten. I wanted an interesting recipe involving plums, and when I found this one that featured not only plums but cardamom I knew I could stop searching and start baking. A few notes about the recipe- don't ask me why it mentions cookie sheets. For one, this is a cake, thus I made it in my Pyrex casserole dish that doubles as a cake pan in my Spartan and minimalistic kitchen. For two, the picture accompanying the recipe isn't even in a cookie sheet, which further confounds me. Moving on...

I made a few tweaks here and there that I can't remember because I fly by the seat of my pants most of the time in the kitchen, but just trust me that whatever you do during the mixing and baking process will turn out fine because you can't really go wrong with a dense, moist fruit cake filled with cardamom. Oh yes, that is one tweak I made- extra cardamom. I also chopped up the plums and mixed half in with the batter to incorporate the flavor throughout, and sprinkled the other half on top so they would get nice and broiled, bursting open and letting their juice seep into the cake.

This is how it turned out, and Bobby happily at it all week long for breakfast as well as for snacks at work.


It just occurred to me that it would have been nice to take a picture of this served up on a plate so you could see the plums specked throughout. This was excellent with a scoop of vanilla coconut milk ice cream.

Back in the Swing of Things

It's been a long time, I know. The datestamp on the last post is practically waggling its finger at me like a chiding grandmother, and man I hate letting my Granny down! I'll try and work through the guilt and get this post out. I don't want you to think that the lack of posting means that I haven't been cooking- on the contrary, I've been cooking a lot, and taking lots of pictures, it's just the execution that's been lacking. So, let's jump right in with a picture heavy post, shall we? We shall.
Oh, hello there beautiful rainbow beets. What delicious culinary pleasures do you have in store?
If you ever want to coax yourself into falling in love with vegetables, I suggest roasting them in some quality olive oil, freshly cracked black pepper, and a good strong fresh herb- I used rosemary here. This vegetable mix included the beets pictured above, as well as red, orange, green, and yellow bell peppers, red onions, squash, and zucchini.
Here they are after a little visit to a 400 degree oven, for about 45 minutes.
I whipped up a creamy tomato based sauce, but since I wing most of my sauces it's hard to remember everything I dumped in there. I do remember loosely creating a red pepper cashew vegan cheese sauce, before mixing it, in batches, with canned crushed tomatoes. I'm certain a splash of coconut milk went into this mix.
The roasted veggies meet their new friend, creamy sauce.
And then they dogpile some orecchiette pasta. It's things like creating a sauce from scratch, and roasting a large variety of vegetables, that give simple veggie pasta dishes like this an interesting depth. I think that the reason so many people like meat in their pasta dishes is because vegetarian options at restaurants are notoriously boring and bland. I mean, what's fun about getting charged $12 for a pile of noodles swimming in watery tomato sauce that looks deceptively like Prego from a can? Pretty much nothing. Another good variation if you want a fast sauce is to take a portion of the roasted veggies and run them through your food processor with some coconut milk, before adding it to some roughly chopped tomatoes, or crushed tomatoes from a can, and the rest of the roasted veggies. This is a fast way to make an interesting tomato sauce with minimal work involved.