Broccoli cheezy soup -- a decadent meal in a bowl

It all started with the squasheeta.

I came across this recipe for "butternut squasheeta" and had to try it, partly because I'd never made a squash-based cheez recipe before, but mostly because I loved the name.  I mostly followed the recipe -- I included a generous tablespoon of the optional miso, and only used one teaspoon of olive oil to roast the squash, which turned out to be plenty -- and it was great.  I made this ahead of time and didn't use any water.  It was velvety and thick and beautifully orange (and like an idiot, I didn't take a picture).  When it was time to actually eat it, I heated up the portion we were going to use with some plain unsweetened soy milk to take it from a spread to more of a sauce consistency.

The only problem with this orange goodness is I was having trouble fitting it into my meal planning.  See, a standard dinner at my house is starch, legume, vegetable.  Butternut squash is a starch, but squasheeta cries out to be eaten with more starch -- over pasta if you eat pasta, or rice, or a baked potato.  The first night we had it, I ate it with rice, broccoli, and a side of baked tofu.  That was good, but after that I was having trouble figuring out how else to eat it.

Yesterday it occurred to me to make it into soup.  I had about half the squasheeta left at that point, and I knew I wanted to add protein so the soup could be a complete meal.  Silken tofu to the rescue!  Here's what I did:

Broccoli Squasheeta Soup

Makes 2 meal-sized servings

About 1/2 recipe butternut squasheeta
12-oz package silken tofu (I used extra firm)
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
2 T lemon juice
1 generous T white miso
unsweetened, plain nondairy milk of choice (I used almond, because that's what was available)
1 lb broccoli florets

First, put some nutritional yeast in your cat's food dish, so he doesn't drive you nuts while you're cooking.  Actually, lock the more rambunctious cat in the bedroom, and give the more well-behaved one (who also knows how to open doors) some nooch in his food dish.

Puree the silken tofu until it is very smooth.  I was feeling lazy so I just dumped it in the cooking pot and used my immersion blender.

Add the squasheeta and stir to combine.  Now you have a  yellow mass of creamy goodness that tastes kind of bland.

Add the nooch, lemon juice, and miso, and use the immersion blender again to combine and make very smooth.  Turn on the stove

Slowly heat up the soup mixture, stirring in milk of choice until you get to the consistency you want.  At some point you will want to cover the pot because it'll start blorping and spitting all over the stove.

Add your broccoli florets.  I used frozen broccoli and dumped it directly in the soup.  You could also use either fresh or frozen and cook it separately.  When the soup and broccoli are hot all the way through, it's done!

Tell the cat he'll get his when you're finished.

My girlfriend pronounced this the best cheezy soup I've ever made.  I'm thinking it's the super smoothness of the squash and tofu.  In the future, if I didn't already have squasheeta on hand, I think I would just use some plain baked squash, processed until it was super smooth, and add additional miso, lemon, nooch, and maybe some garlic powder.  If you're allergic to soy, you could follow Jo Stepaniak's suggestion and use pureed white beans instead of tofu, but it won't be as rich and decadent tasting.

It was really good with some of this sprinkled on top:

 

 My latest Trader Joe's purchase.  Smoked paprika, garlic, and salt in a cute little grinder.  Essentially, it's calorie-free vegan Bac-os.  Om nom nom.

Bean and barley chowder

After last week's broth debacle, I was still determined to cook a bean and barley soup.  "Bean and Barley Chowder" was last week's "recipe of the week" over at the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, and it sounded good to me, but maybe a little boring, especially once I knew homemade vegetable broth was not going to be part of the formula.   Then I got an email from America's Test Kitchen about a vegetable barley soup that had deep flavors without homemade broth (warning:  non-vegan site), and the way ahead was clear.

I combined elements of both recipes, and as always this dish was also influenced by what I had in the pantry.  Lima beans and barley sounded good, but I didn't have either.  I found barley at my local health food store, but no lima beans, so I went with the cannelini beans I already had in the house.  I liked the idea of using ground dried mushrooms to add flavor to the broth, but didn't see any reason to stick to the stingy amount in the America's Test Kitchen recipe.  I ended up grinding an entire package of mixed dried mushrooms (about 0.8 oz), and putting that in.

Flavor enhancers:  portobello mushrooms, extra virgin olive oil, Bragg Liquid Aminos, ground dried mushrooms, onions, celery, leeks.

Mushroom, Bean, and Barley Chowder

All ingredient quantities are (very) approximate

One tablespoon olive oil

One onion, chopped

Two stalks celery, chopped

Two leeks, white and light green part only, halved lengthwise and then sliced crosswise

Six ounces portobello mushrooms (two big mushroom caps), diced

0.8 oz package mixed dried mushrooms, ground to a powder in an electric grinder (What?  You don't have a coffee grinder you reserve for grinding spices?  Why not?)

One pound cannelini beans, soaked overnight and then drained

About half a pound of barley

A few carrots, peeled and sliced

Bragg Liquid Aminos, to taste

Poultry seasoning, to taste

Chick'n style seasoning or nutritional yeast, to taste

Water

In a large soup pot (6-8 quarts), saute onion, celery, and leeks in olive oil until onion is translucent.  Add portobello mushrooms and continue cooking until mushrooms release their liquid.  Sprinkle in poultry seasoning and powdered mushrooms and stir so they coat everything.  Add all other ingredients (I would start with two quarts of water and see how you feel), stir, bring to a boil, then simmer, stirring occasionally, until the beans and barley are fully cooked.  

  

A few notes on ingredients:

• There's no poultry in poultry seasoning.  It's a mixture of thyme, sage, marjoram, rosemary, black pepper, and nutmeg that makes things taste like Thanksgiving.  If you don't have it, but have all those other herbs and spices, you can make your own.   
• Those ground mushrooms really added body and flavor to the broth.  Highly recommended.  I used a mix of mushrooms that I happened to have in the pantry.  I think either porcini or shiitake would work fine.
• If you don't have cannelini beans, any kind of white beans would work.  I would advise against using canned beans, because the cooking beans add body to the broth.
• I threw in some chick'n seasoning because I happened to have it made up, and poultry seasoning made me think of it.  You could also use a couple tablespoons of plain nutritional yeast, or leave it out.
• Can I just give a shout-out to Trader Joe's Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil right here?  That stuff is a revelation.  It tastes like olives.  It's probably really wasted on this recipe.  If I were really feeling decadent, I would drizzle a little on top of my bowl of soup, right before I ate it.  If you are the kind of person who likes to dunk bread in olive oil, this is the olive oil to use.

This soup was really yummy and reheated well.  I ate it for breakfast for most of the week (the photo above was taken on my desk).  My girlfriend pronounced it a keeper.  And as a bonus, I got a good start on my next broth bag: 

      

Onion, celery, leeks, mushrooms, carrots.   No mystery ingredients this time.

 

 

When good broths go bad

You all know about the broth bag, right?  You save all your vegetable scraps in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and when it's full you use it to make stock.  Well, I've had a bag in my freezer for a while now, and I want to make some bean and barley chowder this weekend, so I decided to make some broth.  I put the contents of the bag in my biggest slow cooker crock, filled it with water, and left it on High all day.

When I got home from work, I could smell the savory broth the moment I got off the elevator.  It smelled great, and my apartment smelled even better.  I turned off the slow cooker and strained the broth into a storage container.  It was a lovely dark brown, and smelled like onions and other wonderful homemade goodness.

And then I tasted it.  It was bitter.  I tasted it again.  Still bitter.  I tasted it a third time.  Did I want to use this bitter liquid as the base for my chowder?  I did not.  I poured it down the sink.

I'm trying to figure out what went wrong.  Here's what was in the bag:

onions (ends and skins)
garlic (same)
carrot peels
potato peels (just a few)
celery tops and ends
fennel tops
lime rind
squash ends -- summer and winter

I'm thinking either the squash or the lime rind was a mistake.  The other stuff seems benign.  I always use the onion skins in my broth because they make it a pretty color, and I can't remember ever having a problem.

Any ideas?  I had both red and yellow onions in there, but I don't think that can be it.

So I will be making my soup this weekend with Spike broth powder, plus about a cup of bean stock I have languishing in the freezer. Gayelord Hauser was a charlatan, but the broth powder is pretty good.  I'm going to grind up some dried wild mushrooms too, as recommended by America's Test Kitchen, and hope that does the trick.

Edible gifts redux

I wanted to follow up on my post about soup in a jar and show you how it turned out.

My girlfriend decided she wanted to give these as office gifts, too.  We set up an assembly line and ended up making 14 of them.  She tied the labels on with some festive yarn.

A few tips, if you decide to do this:

• If you're making up a big batch of the spice blend in advance, as I did, it will not go as far as you think it will.  We had to stop midway through and make some more.  I think this is probably the result of settling, since I made the spice blend the night before.  
• A canning funnel was a huge help when it came to pouring the lentils and rice into the jars without getting them all over the table.
• Tap the jar firmly on the table after each addition, to keep the layers level and make sure the jars are packed tight.  That will keep them looking nice when you shlep them to wherever they're going.

We packed these in gift bags with tissue paper, and included a can of coconut milk with each jar (another protip:  Trader Joe's coconut milk is only $0.99 a can!  They also had good prices on red lentils and jasmine rice.).  

Everyone really seemed pleased to receive these.  They were also impressed that we had made them ourselves, which made me laugh -- yes, I poured ingredients into a jar all by myself!  Also, I was afraid this was a hackneyed idea, but people acted like it was a great novelty.  Several commented on how creative I am (!).  Of course Glue and Glitter is the creative one, and I did give her credit.  I guess it all depends on what you're used to.

We wanted to know how it tasted, of course, so I made a batch with some ingredients we had left over:

 
I followed the printed directions exactly (except I used a little less olive oil than called for).  I like the combination of the two kinds of lentils.  The red ones disintegrated and the brown ones stayed relatively firm, which was a nice contrast.  I also love the aromatic spices, and the creamy richness of the coconut milk.  If I were going to make it again:

• I would add more liquid.  The rice really drank it all up, and as you can see above I ended up with a porridgelike consistency (in fact, I have been eating this as my breakfast starch and it fills that role nicely).
• I would use brown rice instead of white.  I think I just prefer a little more chewiness.  Wild rice might be nice, too.  I've been eating a fair amount of wild rice lately.
• More spice.  Maybe some garam masala.  Maybe more black pepper.  Maybe a little cayenne.  Also, the recipe calls for "salt to taste" and it definitely needed the salt.  It might not if there were more heat in it.
• Maybe change the proportions of beans to rice.  As written it's about half and half.  I think I would prefer 2/3 beans to 1/3 rice, or maybe even 3/4 to 1/4.  But I'm a huge bean fan and your mileage may vary.
• Maybe throw some more veggies in there.  Cabbage.  Carrots.  Spinach.  Of course then we're really moving away from the "just about everything you need is in the jar" concept.

To sum up -- it's a nice bowl of comfort food and probably a good starter recipe for people who are afraid of Indian cooking, but I don't think I would make it as written again.  I do think it would be a good starting point for my own creation, though, and that's often how I use recipes, especially for soup.

I had to laugh, because unbeknownst to me, my boss had bought me two bags of chili mix from a group called the Women's Bean Project.  I'm soaking the beans from one bag this morning, and will be making chili later today.  I'll give a review of that one when it's done.

Thanksgiving wrap-up

Kitty-chan leads the parade down Central Park West!

Kudos to me -- I'm getting my Thanksgiving post done before Christmas.

As I posted before I went to NY, I have an amazing family.  My omnivore mom and aunt planned a totally  vegan Thanksgiving dinner, even though my girlfriend and I were going to be the only vegans there.  And everything was so delicious, I photographed it all and collected the recipes.  (My aunt said afterwards, "I hope you got some pictures of the family, too."  Um, oops.)

We tend not to have "traditional" Thanksgiving foods at our Thanksgiving dinners.  Before I went vegan, I was vegetarian for many years, and my mom didn't see the point in cooking a turkey I wasn't going to eat.  For a while we had a mini-tradition of eating spinach lasagna for Thanksgiving dinner.   But we've had all kinds of different things.  Last year Thanksgiving was just my mom, my girlfriend, and me, and I cooked all Indian dishes except for the desserts.  The one constant has always been cranberry sauce, but this year we didn't even do that.  We did have cranberry desserts though, so I guess cranberries are the constant.

I tried to take pictures of all the delicious food, but when I got home and started to upload the photos, I couldn't find my picture of the main courses!  So you'll have to live without that, but But then I found it a month later and edited the post, so yay! I do have recipes, or information about how to get the recipes, for everything I ate.

Edible Gifts

I don't give a lot of holiday gifts.  I'm Jewish, and when I was growing up Chanukah was never a gift-giving extravaganza the way Christmas seems to be.  These days I buy Chanukah gifts for three people -- my mom and my two little cousins -- and those were all shipped out a week ago or more.  But I do believe in playing well with others, so I try to give a little edible gift to my coworkers every year.

Last year I made the candy cane variation of this fudge, and it was a huge hit.  But I don't eat stuff like that any more, and I didn't want the ingredients in my house.  I also read an article about food gifts that spoke to me -- it said everyone is already inundated with junk food at Christmas, and would appreciate something healthy.  So I hit on soup mix in a jar.

It's not so easy to find a soup-in-a-jar recipe that is both vegan and delicious-sounding, but I finally hit on this one, courtesy of Glue and Glitter.  It sounds yummy, and I had a lot of the supplies in the house, including some leftover pint canning jars. And  G and G even provides cute little recipe tags to print out! My girlfriend and I decided we would both give these to our coworkers.  We are going to include a can of coconut milk with the jar of soup mix, since that's an ingredient a lot of people don't have lying around in their pantries (if people don't have olive oil, onions, and garlic lying around, they are never going to cook anything and I give up).  Yesterday we replenished our supply of canning jars and lids, and got some cute little gift bags that are NOT Christmas themed.  We also made the spice mix, which included removing a huge pile of cardamom seeds from their pods and grinding them, because that's how we roll around here.  That was probably the most time consuming aspect of the whole project.

This morning I made up a prototype, with stuff I happened to have in the house:

Cute, right?  The layers of lentils and rice didn't come out as even as I would like.  I'll have to work on that.  Maybe I'll go ahead and cook this one for us -- we talked about doing a taste test.

The Healthy Vegan Traveler: Quest for Protein

Like all vegans, I get sick of hearing "Where do you get your protein?"  The correct answer to this question is "From food."  All food has protein in it.  Most of the calories in broccoli are from protein.  If you ate nothing but potatoes, like this guy, you would still get enough protein to survive.

There's "enough to survive," though, and "enough for a specific person to function optimally."  Last winter I consulted a vegan nutritionist.  I don't follow all of her recommendations, but one thing I did learn was that I wasn't eating enough protein.  In order for me to feel good and not get light-headed or overly hungry between meals, I need to consume about 14 grams of protein at each meal.  That's the equivalent of a cup of cooked beans, or a small serving of tofu.  This is not at all a big deal when I'm at home.  When I'm travelling, though, especially away from a major city, getting enough protein -- and enough calories, for that matter -- can be a challenge.

Acorn Squash and Apple Soup

We don't have a garden.  We live in an apartment, and our cats are such fearsome predators we can't even have houseplants.   We know people who have gardens, though, and sometimes they share.

Most of the time, receiving a gift of fresh produce from someone who gardens is unmitigated wonderfulness. Once in a while, though, you think "This is so great.  Now what am I going to do with it?" That's how I responded when I received this acorn squash:

Cat:  "This squash is so great . . . ." 

". . . now what are we going to do with it?"