Prison Food

When I first made this peanut stew- recipe found here - I posted about it on FB. Just an offhanded reference in a status update about my day, and how I was excited to try a new recipe after a friend recommended this fabulous site. My father commented and said "Peanut stew? That sounds like prison food, haha". You have to imagine the image he conjured up in his head- a bowl of thin, watery gruel with two sorry peanuts floating in it. I laughed out loud because I could hear his voice in my head as he was saying it. Rest assured, this is not just watery gruel with two peanuts floating in it. I have picture evidence that it was fabulous. As usual, I tweaked this recipe beyond recognition but the basic bones of it are the same.
If this is prison food, lock me up and throw away the key. Ok, not really. But it was very good.
I also made carrot rice following a recipe from the same site. I wasn't as excited about the rice, but I'm generally not a rice person, so it's just personal preference.
I liked the rice much more when it was mixed with the stew. These two went together very well, but I wasn't quite done yet. Since I had to peel and chop sweet potatoes for the stew I figured I'd go ahead and make sweet potato cornbread from scratch as well...
This recipe is from the cookbook How it All Vegan. You can see the flecks of mashed sweet potato dotted throughout the bread, and trust me they make all the difference. I use brown sugar when making this, because I find it complements the sweet potato really well. This is also a great breakfast bread, smeared with butter or a vegan substitute, and sprinkled with a little bit of cinnamon. This recipe is a close approximation of the one I used, and looks like it can be easily modified if needed. These usually make really good muffins as well, and as I've said before I find them *much* easier to store, transport, and freeze that way. Do check out Holy Cow! Vegan Recipes if you get a chance, she's never let me down so far and her recipes are fantastic.

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.