Home Cooking

Kris over at Two Vegan Boys has challenged everyone to eat more at home and less at restaurants. Really she challenged everyone to eat entirely at home for a year, but Dewey and I aren't up for that challenge yet. She'll be blogging what she eats for dinner every night here.

We have noticed over the past few months a rapidly rising food budget. Or maybe just a lack of a food budget. Either way, I'm committing to cooking more of our meals at home, and doing so with my eye on the food budget.

As part of this, I'm going to be posting more of our ordinary home dinners. They aren't always exciting, they won't always come with recipes, and (this one kills me) the photos won't always be pretty. But they'll show what one vegan and one along-for-the-ride omnivore eat for dinner. I'm also committing to trying more recipes from the cookbooks I've been buying faster than I can use them.

Above is last night's dinner. A thrown-together enchilada soup made from all the leftovers in the house: enchilada sauce, corn, carrot sticks, black beans, potatoes (leftover from making latkes), a minced chipotle chili, tofutti sour cream, and some seasonings. The only thing we bought to make this was a can of beans.

The biscuits are cornmeal biscuits from Vegan Brunch, and they're amazing. Really easy to make and the perfect pair for some Tex-Mex-inspired soup. I mixed the dough and put half of them in the oven, and while they baked I made the soup. I think the entire meal took about 35 minutes to make, including clean up. Half the rolls went in to the freezer for future lunches and dinners.

If you've hesitated about buying Vegan Brunch because you rarely eat brunch, don't let that stop you! I've made lots of great recipes from this cookbook, and rarely before 6PM. I think with the exception of cinnamon rolls, most of the recipes in the book make great dinners. And I promise not to judge you if you eat cinnamon rolls for dinner occasionally.

Help! There's Nothing to Pack for Lunch

Sometimes, planning ahead doesn't happen. [See the entire last week.] But if you have a moderately well-stocked pantry, you can probably pull something out for lunch. Especially if you consider some often-overlooked foods for lunch. Most of these foods won't make anyone's top-ten list, but they're better than skipping lunch or hitting the vending machine.

Many frozen fruits and vegetables are great for packed lunches. They often don't even need to be heated up. Just toss them in a container and they'll have defrosted by lunch. For fruits, mango and berries do especially well. For vegetables, peas, corn, edamame, and green beans are my favorites. If you have time and motivation, make a compound butter or vinaigrette to go with the vegetables or whip up a smoothie.

Have a can of beans? Blend it together with some oil and whatever herbs you have handy. Even better with some garlic or green onions. Or skip the blender and marinate the beans in your favorite salad dressing. Canned beans mashed with salad dressing makes a great sandwich spread.

Have a can of refried beans? Mix it with canned tomatoes, rotel, or salsa for a great bean dip or puree. For bonus points, add cumin and a bit of chili powder.

Have dry oatmeal? Throw it in a tupperware with plant milk or water and whatever you can scrounge up (consider frozen fruit, jam, dried fruit, nut butter, flax, or nuts). Not into sweet? Make savory oats instead (I like soy sauce, ginger, green onions, and hot sauce in my oatmeal). If you have access to a microwave at work, wait until lunch to cook. Best to use a large container for this and watch closely, as oatmeal can expand and overflow the container as it cooks.

Consider often-overlooked ingredients to round out your meal. Sun-dried tomatoes, pickles, olives, crystalized ginger, nori, and miso are usually in the back of my cabinets or fridge.

This last suggestion is a favorite of mine: soup in a bag. [Note: if Sandra Lee makes you pull out your hair, now is probably a good time to go visit someone else's blog.]

Soup in a Bag

ziplock bag*

frozen vegetables (peas, corn, or vegetable mix)

couscous, broken up angel hair pasta, or fideo noodles (uncooked)**

garlic powder

ginger powder

vegetarian bouillon powder/cube

Add a handful of vegetables to the bag. Add 1 tablespoon couscous or a handful of noodles. Shake a bit of garlic and ginger powder into the bag as well and finish it off with bouillon powder or a bouillon cube.

At lunch time, heat water. Dump the contents of the bag into a mug or bowl. Pour the hot (boiling is best, but not necessary) water over the soup ingredients. Wait 5 minutes for the pasta to absorb water. Stir and enjoy.

*There's no reason not to put the ingredients straight into a microwave-safe tupperware, but I find that mornings where there's no lunch food in the house are also mornings where there aren't any clean tupperware containers.

**You want noodles that will cook in 3-5 minutes. Anything longer (like regular spaghetti), and they won't soften with just boiling water.

Boxed Soups

Leftovers and home-cooked foods are great, but sometimes you need to rely on Mama Grocery Store to provide something to round out your lunch.

I think boxed soups are great to keep around for lunches. Boxed soups, for whatever reason, tend to taste better than canned ones. And they don't require a can opener, which is a bonus for work or school meals. I often rely on them to boost the vegetable count in my lunches between grocery trips.

Due to BPA in can linings, there's been a recent explosion in boxed soups. And a surprising number of the new soups are vegan. I've been keeping a score sheet for every boxed soup I try. Here are my favorites.

Pacific Natural Foods Cashew Carrot Ginger My soup rating system is 1-4 soup spoons. When I tried this soup for the first time, it made me wish that it went to 5, at least. It's creamy, flavorful, and doesn't need any doctoring. This is the soup I'd serve to anyone who thought vegans eat twigs and berries.

Dr. McDougall Roasted Red Pepper Tomato This is my other hands-down favorite. This brand is marketed as healthy convenience food. (You can read about Dr. McDougall's diet here.) They're a little harder to find than the Pacific Natural brand. Locally, I buy them at Whole Foods or Fiesta supermarkets. You can also get them in bulk from Amazon. The Roasted Red Pepper Tomato soup is the perfect balance of tomato-y acid and red pepper sweetness, and there are nice chunks of tomatoes, too.

Honorable mentions: Imagine Foods Potato Leek, Imagine Foods Corn and Lemongrass, and Pacific Natural Foods Thai Sweet Potato.

The Fig and Colavita soups also pictured above are so new, I haven't had a chance to try them.

Celebratory zucchini soup

I've left behind my crummy night job, and I'm beginning a new (sane?) daytime job tomorrow. That means more sunny hours for cooking, photography, and gardening. Ooo boy!

To celebrate, I scrounged through the produce lurking at the bottom of the fridge and came up with one zucchini and one yellow squash, a little worse for time. Coincidentally (magically?) I saw a recipe for zucchini soup in last week's Meatless Monday newsletter. I can't ever say no to soup.

[Meatless Monday aside. I really like this organization. They have a great nutrition news roundup, and I love the vegetable-packed message. But I've found the recipes to be hit or miss. This one was a hit, though.]

Here's my version of the soup, modified to fit the contents of my fridge.

Summer Squash Soup

oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
2 summer squash, cut into 1-inch pieces
vegetable broth
2 teaspoons dried tarragon
1/4 cup nutritional yeast

Sautee onion in just a smidge of oil until soft. Add the garlic, and cook 30 seconds longer. Add the summer squash, tarragon, and enough vegetable broth to just barely cover the vegetables. Simmer 10 minutes or until the squash is soft. Blend with an immersion blender (or transfer to a blender in batches). Stir in nutritional yeast. Serve hot!

February: Some Updates

It's been a busy month. I (finally!) found a job. Unfortunately, it's third shift. It's put a bit of a cramp in my photography and gardening since both of these things need sunlight.

In general Dewey and I have been busy improving the house, introducing the cats to one another, and just generally adjusting to the new schedule. But I've found a bit of time to squeeze in my hobbies here and there.

At the top is a puttanesca scramble from Vegan Brunch. It's a tofu scramble with tomatoes, olives, and capers. I had a lot of leftover ingredients from an antipasto salad, and this was a perfect way to use them up. I wasn't sure what I would think of this, especially since the antipasto salad wasn't a hit. But it was great.

I never wrote a review of Vegan Brunch, but some of our favorites are the courico tacos made with soy curls, the chocolate beer waffles with sweet cashew cream, and the (virgin) Bloody Moskowitz.

This is the baked potato soup from Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food. This cookbook has found a steady spot in our diet now that I have less time for cooking. Those are chopped green onions on top of the soup. I've been obsessed with them lately.

A little "aha" cooking moment from earlier this month. You have a microplane grater, right? They're lovely. They're great for zesting or grating small things like garlic or nutmeg. And they won't tear up your sponge (or your knuckles!) the way a traditional grater does. Anyway, if you turn the microplane grater upside down while you grate, it collects whatever it is you're grating.
I've put together the frame for my new square foot garden, but I've decided not to plant until we get the lawn regraded. Anything planted now will just get torn up then. Bummer for now, but in the long run, fixing the lawn so water doesn't drain under the house is more important.

And finally, I took Lizzie's advice (though her comment seems to have disappeared since then), and went with a chicken wire compost bin. Hopefully by this time next year I'll have enough of my own compost that I won't need to buy any to build a second square foot garden.

Ode to Soup

1. black bean soup
2. yellow pea and coconut soup
3. squash soup
4. Asian-style cabbage soup
5. black bean soup
6. tortilla soup
7. squash soup
8. squash soup
9. broccoli soup
10. cashew butternut squash soup
11. Thai curry soup
12. matzah ball soup
13. tortilla soup
14. green coriander and ginger broth
15. cholent
16. rajmah

Chili on My Mind

Ever since the chili cookoff, I've had chili on my mind. The third place chili at the cookoff was a masala chili made by a woman who teaches Indian cooking classes here in Austin. Her masala chili and coconut chili were two of my favorites, and I'm glad she won.

I kept thinking about her masala chili all week, so I pulled out my copy of 660 Curies by Raghavan Iyer. Sometimes I think all the choices in this book have kept me from making more recipes. How do I pick which of the 660 curries to make? But this time, I opened the book with an agenda. I wanted to make rajmah, or kidney beans. I found a recipe for tamatar malai rajmah (slow-stewed tomato sauce with kidney beans), and it was exactly what I wanted.

The recipe turned out pretty well, though not as rich as I would have liked, but that's because I modified it. It calls for 1/4 cup fried onion paste, and that's one of the other reasons I haven't made many recipes from this book. Many call for small amounts onion paste or another kind of paste, but the recipes for these pastes make large amounts and don't keep long in the refrigerator. All that waste annoys me. And I'm pretty lazy. Instead I sauteed diced onion. I also left out the 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream the recipe calls for since Dewey is still on a low-fat diet.

But still, my chili craving wasn't over. Dewey has been asking for cholent lately, so it was the perfect time to make Jewish chili. Cholent is a stew that Jews make for Shabbat, when they can't cook any food. Cholent is started in a slow cooker or on a hot plate just before sunset on Friday night, it cooks all night long at low heat, and then it's eaten at Saturday lunch. Such a long cooking time, even at low heats, makes the beans and vegetables really soft, but in a good, comfort food way.


Vegan Cholent

1 T oil
1-2 onions
4-5 cloves garlic
3 red or yukon gold potatoes
2 carrots
2 1/2 cups mixed dried beans*, soaked for 8 hours
1/2 cup bulgur
vegetable bouillion cube**
water
12 ounces dark beer
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 teaspoons tarragon
2 teaspoons thyme
1 tablespoon paprika
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper

Turn on the slow cooker and heat the oil. Chop the potatoes and carrots into large pieces. You want them to be fairly large because they're going to cook so long. Add the onions and garlic to the slow cooker, cover, and let cook for about half an hour. Add the potatoes, carrots, drained beans, and bulgur. Add the bouillon cube and enough water to cover the beans. Add the beer, soy sauce and all the spices except for the salt and stir. Cover and cook 6-12 hours***, stirring occasionally. Once the beans are soft, add the salt. If the beans look dry, add more water. Eventually, the liquid will thicken into a tasty brown sauce. When you're ready to eat, adjust the salt to your taste.

*I used chickpeas, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, split peas, and lentils. Really, any combination of dried beans, peas, or lentils will work, just be sure to use at least three kinds.

**Feel free to use vegetable broth in place of the bouillon cube, or even just water and a bit more soy sauce.

***I know this is a big range for a cooking time, but this is a recipe that is meant to be flexible.

Pantry Soup

Dewey and I have something fluish. So there hasn't been much cooking going on. Lots of graham crackers and peanut butter and whole wheat English muffins with EB and marmite on my end. Dewey's been subsisting on frozen pizza and ramen. We're both topping it off with lots of gingerale. I'm trying not to remember the last time we ate a vegetable.

Yesterday, I was finally able to stand up long enough to make real food. So long as it didn't require too much standing up. So I threw together a bunch of pantry staples for a quick Thai-style soup.

This was half a bag of frozen vegetables, some pearl onions that have been languishing in the freezer, lite coconut milk, vegetable broth, noodles, a bit of red curry powder, and about a cup of basil from the garden.

Asian-style Cabbage Soup

This soup, despite its looks, is one of my favorites. It's loosely adapted from this recipe on Epicurious.

I love this recipe the way I make it. It uses up that half head of cabbage that lingers in the vegetable bin. It has soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat, a diabetic-friendly grain. And it easily scales to fit whatever amount of cabbage or noodles I have on hand.

This is, very loosely, how I make the soup.

Asian-Style Cabbage Soup

1 head cabbage, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons sesame oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
1-inch ginger, minced
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons Sherry
3 tablespoons tahini
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons chili garlic sauce
vegetable broth
2 bunches of soba noodles

Saute cabbage in sesame oil until tender but not mushy, about five minutes. Add garlic and ginger and saute until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the other seasonings and enough vegetable broth to cover by about two inches. Bring to a boil. Add soba noodles, and cook according to the directions on the package.

Tortilla Soup Redux

My friend Merf's tortilla soup is one of my favorite ways to use summer squash. This soup is never the same two times in a row. This time I added about a quarter cup of salsa to the broth. Dewey isn't really crazy about squash, so I was happy that he liked this.

When I planned to make this earlier in the week, it was about 60 degrees. It was in the 90s today when I finally made it. Whoops. So I had to follow it up with a mango fruit bar. To maintain balance in the universe and all.

Quick, Easy Dinner

Broccoli soup with garlic bread. This took maybe 15 minutes of hands on time and a bit of waiting for things to boil. A quick, healthy weeknight dinner.*

Dewey likes to watch "Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares." He's been wanting to try a recipe for broccoli soup from one of the episodes. The recipe: boil broccoli in salted water, puree with a bit of the boiling water, and serve with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of pepper.

*Dewey insists on adding "easy-peasy lemon-squeezy". There is no lemon in this recipe.

Thanksgiving and more soup

Third time is the charm for Thanksgiving. I made these mushrooms in puff pastry for the vegetarians at my Thanksgiving. It was a success, but what was even better was the pie. If you haven't tried Isa's smlove pie yet, do it now! My entire pie was gone before the family even sliced into either of the two Sara Lee pumpkin pies. Not that I bragged all weekend or anything.

I wasn't measuring since the mushroom puffs were just for myself, but it's onions, mushrooms, and pecans sauteed in oil with a splash of brandy, a big splash of soy sauce, nutmeg, and pepper all wrapped in puff pastry squares.

It's also soup season again. Here's cashew-butternut squash soup with red curry drizzle.

Ballin'

This past weekend, my kickball team got together for matzah ball soup. The woman who hosted everything was nice enough to make a vegetarian soup, too. So of course, I had to bring a kugel.


Kugel is basically Jewish casserole. If you're British, you might call it pudding. Potato kugel, sweet or savory noodle kugel, and broccoli kugel are all traditional. This is cauliflower leek kugel. And it is not at all traditional. There are herbs! And leeks! And nuts!

The first time I made this someone told me he didn't finish his first helping because it was so good, he thought it wasn't kosher. This past weekend, a woman told me it was better than her grandmother's kugel. I don't want to get anyone in trouble with their Bubbeh, but this stuff is good.

This is all to prepare you for the matzah ball soup. See, Eastern European Jewish cooking hasn't changed much. Did you see how excited I got about the fresh herbs? So when I saw that my friend had added vegetables to the soup, I was amazed and delighted. Green beans and new potatoes in the matzah ball soup. It was enlightening. Traditionally, matzah ball soup is just matzah balls and broth. Maybe a sliced carrot. (But never in my mother's soup.) So the idea of adding fresh, spring vegetables really blew me away. Enough that I went home and made my own matzah ball soup. I made this recipe, boiling the vegetables in the broth while the matzah balls cooled in the fridge. The cooked vegetables hung out in a bowl while the matzah balls cooked. If you've read much of my blog, you'll know to trust me when I say the matzah balls absolutely have to wait in the fridge an hour before you cook them. I'm all about the short cut, but you don't want to end up with matzah balls that disintegrate.

Tortilla Soup

The first of the summer's squash showed up at this weekend's farmers' market. And tortilla soup is always the first recipe I think of when confronted with a vegetable drawer full of summer squash. My friend Merf taught me to make tortilla soup this way one summer when we both worked testing ESL students. After tasting this, our coworkers wanted to know why we were bothering to go to college. After all, we already knew how to cook.

Merf is the kind of cook who throws in a cup of this and a dash of that and mixes it up up with her hands. Every time she makes a dish it comes out a little different, and it's usually pretty delicious, too. The amounts in this recipe will be vague because it just wouldn't be right otherwise.

Free Spirit Tortilla Soup

oil for sauteing
an onion, chopped
garlic, minced

summer squash, sliced and cut in half if the pieces are large
broth
salt

Saute the onion over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant (about thirty seconds). Add the squash and saute until the squash is golden and soft but not mushy. Add the broth until it covers all the vegetables by about half an inch. Heat the soup and salt to taste.

My friend E tells me that when Merf taught her to make this soup, they added tomatoes with the broth. So feel free to add tomatoes. Or anything else.

The most important part of this recipe are the garnishes. Garnish with

a squeeze of lime
cilantro
avocado, chopped
broken tortilla chips

Peanut Cauliflower Soup

This soup was a Friday night soup. Saturday is my day for grocery shopping, so that makes Friday my day to use up odds and ends in the fridge. One Friday, I had celery, carrots, part of an onion, and half a head of cauliflower to use up. The celery and carrots weren't good enough to be eaten raw, so soup it was. I remembered seeing a recipe for Virginian Peanut Soup in Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. The soup called for potatoes. Pureed potatoes make for a pretty creamy soup. People make mashed cauliflower in place of mashed potatoes all the time. So I figured why not?

Peanut Cauliflower Soup

oil for sauteeing
half an onion, minced
2 celery stalks, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 cup cauliflower, chopped
salt and pepper
2 bay leaves
enough vegetable broth (or water) to cover
1 cup of soymilk (optional)
1/2 to 3/4 cup peanut butter
cayenne pepper

Sautee the onions until soft (about 3 minutes). Add the celery and carrots and cook another 3 minutes. Add the cauliflower, bay leaves, and enough broth or water to cover everything. Bring to a boil and simmer covered for 30 minutes. Remove the bay leaves and discard. Puree the soup with a hand blender (or in batches in a regular blender). Stir in peanut butter and soy milk and season to taste with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Warm the soup on the stove without letting it boil. Serve with a dollop of peanut butter and a sprinkle of cayenne.

This tastes better than it looks.

I tried one last soup recipe from my new cookbooks. Cholent is a Jewish stew usually made on the Sabbath. It's started at sundown Friday night, and then cooks at a low heat until Saturday lunch. Traditionally, cholent is a combination of beef, beans, potatoes, lentils, and carrots. The more ingredients the better. Just like Italian grandmothers and their tomato sauce recipes, every Ashkenazic Jewish family has their own cholent recipe. This one from Veganomicon is full of kidney beans, butter beans, lentils, tvp chunks, potatoes, and carrots. It was flavored with caraway seeds, and I'm not sure what I think of them yet. Caraway is the seed used in rye bread. I took the cholent over to a friend's house, and he thought the lentils were rye. Don't worry, I didn't know what to say about that either. Other than baking rye bread (you know how I feel about yeast), anyone have a favorite way to use caraway seeds?

National Soup Month

Apparently, January is National Soup Month. I guess I'm not the first person to think that January and soup go together like beans and rice. It's also National Tea Month, National Book Month, and Prune Breakfast Month. I think I can do without Prune Breakfast Month.

Here's my latest soup: Green Coriander and Ginger Broth with tofu. It was good, but not great. It's got lots of coriander (cilantro), celery, shiitake mushrooms, and green onions. I sprinkled this bowl-full with sesame oil, and I had another bowl-full with some Tabasco. I think hot chili oil would probably be a good compromise. Either way, I don't think I'll be making this soup again. Maybe it would taste better with fresher ingredients, but I think I just like stronger flavors.

Soup's On

I received seven new cookbooks in the month of December. Seven! I think people have figured out that I like to cook. Or maybe I just gave enough hints. Of course, this didn't stop me from ordering one more. I can't wait for it to arrive on January 8. What?

It was hard deciding what to make first from all these lovely books. Especially since December was a gluttonous month that included two birthday cakes, candy making, and two batches of cookies. I'm on sugar overload, and it's been so long since I've had my fair share of vegetables that things are kinda awkward. "Um, Broccoli, I've been meaning to call. But I've just been so busy. Dessert really needed me this month. But I promise we'll make plans to get together soon."

I can't lie to Broccoli, so I think January is going to be a month of soups. I can get all that lovely warm, I've-been-cooking-this-all-day feeling, and at the same time try out lots of new recipes from my new library. All the cookbooks have soup recipes. Um, except that cupcake cookbook. I may have to hide that one in the freezer.

This is all a long way of saying, look at my pretty soup:

It's Yellow Pea and Coconut Milk Soup with spinach, rice, and spiced yogurt. Except I left out the yogurt. And I used millet instead of rice. But I got the general gist of the soup. It's from Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen. An entire book of soups! I think I'd make this again, but with some changes. For all that this had an entire 15 ounce can of coconut milk, it doesn't taste much like coconut. Next time I'll stick with a smaller can of lite coconut milk. And the recipe directions have you using three different pots and pans. I'm dishes phobic, so next time I'll combine a few steps so I can leave out a pan.