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.

I. Love. My. CSA.

This is an exact copy of a recent post on my other blog, but I really wanted to share it here too- enjoy! And to learn about how you can get your paws on your very own CSA, check out www.localharvest.org. You'll be glad you did!

Last Saturday was Farm Day with our CSA. It's the last pickup of the season, and they invite all the members out to the farm to see where the food is grown and glean the fields. For our last pickup we got an insane amount of grey Hubbard hard squash, a baking pumpkin, a pile of tomatoes, a half gallon of homemade organic, local apple cider, fresh roasted green chilies, and a huge bag of apples. After we hauled all that back to the car, Bobby and I hit the fields. I really, REALLY wish I had brought my camera to the farm, but at least we had a good time photographing the pile of food we brought home, as we laughed and told each other about 10 times "getting a CSA was SO worth it".

We both agreed we should lay everything out on the table and take a picture. It was pretty ridiculous.

In addition to the potatoes, carrots, peppers, broccoli, swiss chard, corn, and tomatoes we gleaned from the field, we also got to pick out a carving pumpkin. Here I am for size reference. Bobby said a few times "this is the best Halloween pumpkin I've ever had!". Thanks for making dreams come true CSA. You're a peach.

You might be thinking, what do you do with all those squash?? The good thing is, these gray guys will last until March, provided they are stored in a dark, temperature controlled, fairly cool place...

so now they're living on the shelf in our laundry room. Their more colorful friends will last until December this way.

This is a HUGE wooden bowl in the middle of our dining room table, filled with apples.

Then we took about two hours to wash, chop, and store all the fridge worthy veggies.

More veggies and the chard filling up both drawers- the left one that's closed is more of the same.

All of the onions, potatoes, shallots, garlic, and beets we got will be going in a wire hanging basket we scored from Goodwill for $1.50, but it needs to be hung. So for now they're living in a canvas bag.

We have been eating like crazy this whole week, and you can bet that the apple cider is almost gone. I need to use the chilies soon before their roasted awesomeness is wasted, but everything else is working out well. Between the natural shelf life of the hard squash, and the fact that we sorted, washed, and chopped pre-emptively, I think we'll get through without wasting too much.

All in all, I'm VERY sad our CSA is over. I've shopped at farmers' markets for years, but CSA's are so much easier, and to me, more enjoyable. Once you vet your CSA and know how they work before you buy a share, you absolutely know that everything you are getting each week is local, organic, and fresh picked. You get to see the people who grow and pick your food every single week for 5 months, or in states with longer growing seasons, sometimes as long as 9 months. Plus it's always fun to have veggies fresh enough to have clumps of dirt on them, or fruit that naturally ripened instead of being picked early to sit on a truck for a month and arrive at the store feeling like a rock and tasting like nothing. And it's cheap. Our CSA was $500 for 5 months. That's $100 a month, $25 a week. We had a fruit and veggie share of local, organic, fresh produce, plus we had a flower share- we got a bouquet every week of native flowers. And then at the end, we were able to glean as much as we wanted. I saw some families carting away wagon loads of food. It's a healthy, environmentally friendly, and economical way to help local farmers and eat great food. I don't ever want to go without a CSA again, and I hope I don't have to!

Veggie Packed Dinner- Bruschetta and Swiss Chard Salad

I took these pictures about two weeks ago, but they languished awhile before I uploaded them, and then I put off going through them for a bit after that. Since last week was our last CSA pickup it kind of makes me a bit sad to look through them, because I loved all the local, fresh, organic produce I got every week. I hope the winter farmer's markets don't let me down!

One of the last big batches of rainbow swiss chard, chopped and ready to become a salad.

Regular tomatoes and green zebra tomatoes, which were later added to chopped fresh garlic, basil from my balcony, and covered liberally in organic olive oil and fresh cracked black pepper. I think I could live off of bruschetta.

The chard was mixed with 3 colors of peppers, peppers, and tomatoes- all from the CSA- and then tossed in lemon goddess dressing and topped with raw, unsalted trail mix and chia seeds.

The bruschetta on top of Whole Foods Seeduction loaf. Not my favorite, but it was nice sliced thinly and toasted.

Doesn't this make you want to eat your veggies? Or at least sit and admire how pretty they are? Getting a CSA was so very worth it. I don't see Bobby and I ever going without a share in a CSA again unless they aren't available where we live. I've shopped at farmers' markets for many, many years, and I try to buy local/organic, but this makes it so much easier. Plus, I got to know the people who grew and picked my food, as I saw them every week for almost 5 months. And I also love when my food is so fresh picked that there are still dirt clumps on it :)

Coming Back Soon...

This blog started off as a food diary- the goal was to take pictures of every.single. meal. I made. And I couldn't use my phone since internet isn't something I feel I need on it. I found myself getting out the camera every time, taking lots of pics from different angles, and then uploading them to my computer, sorting through them, then uploading them here. So, I've decided to just take pictures of a few meals a week- especially since my breakfasts are usually smoothies and/or oatmeal with lots of add ins, and lunches are usually just leftovers from dinner the night before. So, to take off the expectations of every single meal being photographed and blogged about, I'm going to experiment with just a few posts a week.

Today was Farm Day with our CSA. We were able to go out to the farm, see where our food was grown, and glean whatever was left in the fields. We have lots of pictures of our last haul, but it took us about two hours to clean, chop, and put it all away. So, for now it's bedtime.