Roasted Root Veggie Soup

So it's been over a month, hasn't it. I'm sorry friends! We moved at the end of July into an awesome third floor apartment in a historic building. We're talking staircase, 2 bedrooms, wide window sills, all utilities included - bam! We lucked out :)

Other than that, work is super duper hectic right now and I'm usually wiped by the time I get home and, sadly, writing a post is the last thing on my mind. But here I am again with a new recipe for you - it's my "I'm sorry let's make up" present on this late August night.

So the recipe - tonight I whipped up a Roasted Root Veggie Soup sans potatoes. Don't get me wrong, I love potatoes, but sometimes they seem to weigh things down and I really wanted the flavors of some of our unsung root veggie heroes to shine through. I'll admit this is not a pretty soup - it's kind of beige/yellowish and lumpy....but dang it was tasty! Try it out! It's good warm or cold.

Roasted Rood Veggie Soup
Serves 3-4

1 medium sized turnip, peeled & chopped
1 small rutabaga, peeled & chopped
1 fennel bulb, chopped
3 carrots, peeled & chopped
6 unpeeled garlic cloves
1 small leek, thinly sliced
1 tsp fresh or dried thyme
1 tsp fresh or dried rosemary
4 cups veggie stock
1-2 Tbsp red pepper flakes
Salt & pepper to taste

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Place veggies in a foil lined pan and drizzle with oil. Roast about one hour.

Meanwhile, create a little foil pocket for the garlic and drizzle with oil. Roast separately from other veggies, about 30 minutes.

Unwrap veggies, let cool a bit. Squeeze garlic from skin (be careful! it's super hot and the oil can burn!) Set aside.

Heat 1-2 Tbsp oil in a pot over medium heat. Add leek and cook until tender, 6-8 mins. Add veggies, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and veggie stock. Season with salt and pepper. Bring it up to a boil and then reduce to simmer, 5-10 mins. Remove from heat. Puree using a blender or immersion blender - the latter is recommended! Season to taste.

Laptop Lunchtime!

Post Punk Kitchen's Pesto Soup with Gnocchi, Beans & Greens; couscous wtih potato, savoy cabbage, broccoli, chickpeas, & carrots, and seasoned with cumin and tumeric; red bell pepper; sesame seed squares

Laptop Lunch Time!

Happy Herbivore's Greens Quiche, Veganomicon's Porcini & Wild Rice Soup, and a local apple with soynut butter

Potato Leek Soup

Sorry for the hiatus, friends. Things have been crazy in my life lately - my friend at Last House Productions created a bakery logo for me (beautiful!), the bakery has been re-named to Salt and Pine Bakery (please LIKE us on Facebook!) and I've started a Cupcake of the Month Club - more on all this later!

For now though, let me leave you with a yummy fall recipe for potato leek soup. I've had a migraine for the last 4 days and in a moment of lucidity, I whipped together this delicious soup. Enjoy!

4-5 potatoes - I used medium sized red skins; use whatever you want!
1 leek, greens removed and chopped
1/2 a yellow onion, diced
1 garlic clove, minced
A stick or two of celery, diced
salt & pepper
parsley, rosemary, & cayenne - I didn't measure, just use as much as you want!
Broccoli, chopped up really small - as much as you want, I used maybe 1/2 a cup b/c that's all we had!
5-6 cups of veggie stock
1 cup cold veggie stock with 3 Tbsp flour mixed in

Chop the potatoes into small pieces and boil in water until tender. Remove from heat, drain and mash.

In a large soup pot, cook the leek, celery, and onion in some olive oil. Add in garlic and spices and cook. Add mashed potatoes and cook a while longer. Add in the 5-6 cups of stock and bring it up to a boil. Once it's boiling, use an immersion blender to make it really smooth and creamy. If you don't have an immersion blender you can use a regular blender - just be careful because it's hot!!

Allow the soup to simmer a while longer, then add in the 1 cup cold veggie stock with 3 Tbsp flour (make sure there are no lumps). This will thicken the soup a bit. Simmer for a while longer - 5 minutes or so, then add in the broccoli and stir. Check the seasonings to make sure they're where you want them and serve hot! YUM!

Cold Dinners For Hot Nights

Lately we haven't been making many heated dishes. We live in an un-air conditioned apartment and when we're feeling over-heated and tired from work, the last thing we want is a warm plate full of heavy foods. So on Saturday, I peered into the fridge and realized we still had two large containers of veggie stock and a bunch of containers collecting more veggie remnants to make yet more stock - what to do when you're over stocked! It's hot out; Yoga Soup is out of the question.

I remembered when I was growing up my mom used to make us vichyssoise (vee-she-swa) in the summer. Many of you are saying, "Vee-she-what-now?!" It's okay - I'll walk you through this one. Vichyssoise, as defined by Wikepedia is "a thick soup made of pureed leeks, onions, potatoes, cream, and chicken stock" and is usually served cold. Apparently there's a debate over its origins - French or American - but Julia Childs calls it an "American invention" and at the very least, this vegan version is! 

I followed the VegWeb Hot Pepper Vichyssoise recipe posted by queen-o-hearts. After roasting the potatoes, leeks, pablano, jalapeno, garlic, and spices, I could have just eaten a bowl of the veggies. They were deliciously spiced and honestly, who doesn't love roasted veggies?! They'd taste great chilled and served over greens.

Roasted veggies

The soup was easy to make and tasted delicious warm and cold. Despite the heaviness of some of the ingredients - potatoes...soy milk - it was actually light and refreshing and had a slight after-kick. As I was making the soup, our furbaby Bob was trying very hard to distract me....

A cat's life is rough, man.

To accompany the soup, I made Spicy Tempeh with Asparagus, Ginger, and Chile from a new blog discovery, A Profound Hatred of Meat. I'm so glad I stumbled across this blog because blogger Carly Sitner has got some fabulous recipes - check it out! I modified the recipe a little using Lalibela Farm's Black Bean Tempeh, ground ginger (sad face, we were out of fresh), and chili flakes because we didn't have any fresh chiles. It came out pretty good, but Justin thinks we should use less rice wine vinegar when marinating the tempeh because it seemed to really take on the vinegary taste. I'll either cut that in half or eliminate it next time I try the recipe. 

Hot Pepper Vichyssoise, Tempeh & Asparagus, and Quinoa/Flax Seed Bread from Whole Foods

All in all it was a great dinner that was not too hot and heavy - perfect for a mid-summer's night! These two recipes are keepers, folks.

Spicy Noodles With Shitake Mushrooms And Mustard Greens

I knew tonight was going to be a hectic one, so as I was leaving work I jumped onto VegWeb to find a quick and easy recipe for dinner. Ta Da - Spicy Noodles with Shiitake Mushrooms and Mustard Greens. We made a bunch of modifications, listen closely:

-Much less rice noodles because 10.5 ounces is A LOT!

-Sans green onions just because we didn't have any

-Dandelion Greens instead of Mustard Greens because Whole Foods didn't have mustard ones

-Serrano chilies because WF didn't have the Thai chilies

-Braggs instead of soy sauce

-Vegan Mushroom Sauce 

-Asian Garlic Chili Paste instead of Sweet Chili Sauce

-No mint leaves

-Added veggies: edamame and broccoli

-Added seitan 

We made it with more liquid so that it was more like a soup and it came out really well - nice and spicy. My fiance didn't like the greens, I of course loved them. I love the slightly bitter taste of them paired with the spice and the sweetness of the carrots. 

I was perusing on of my newest favorite blogs, Vegansaurus, which led me to the blog The Vegan Stoner. This blog is fantastic - all simple, yummy looking recipes with beautiful photos and adorable doodles. The creators are currently working on a cookbook and I'm super excited to see it. We will certainly be trying some of their recipes in the next few weeks! 

Yoga Soup

I simply adore VegWeb and their awesome Facebook page which is updated with recipe highlights several times a week. Often times, when I'm stuck for a recipe, I jump right to the VegWeb Facebook page and check out their latest highlights. The one that most recently caught my attention was a recipe posting for Yoga Soup by VegWeb member "mishkalee." Just look at the recipe's comments section and it's quickly apparent that it's a favorite among many.

I made the soup on Friday night because my fiance teaches a night adult photography course and doesn't get home until 9:30 and I was tired and not feeling great and just wanted something quick and fairly easy. I made a few adjustments to the recipe, adding chopped crimini mushrooms, green onion, collard greens, broccoli, and sesame seeds, and excluding lime juice. I also used our homemade veggie stock rather than a veg bullion. The soup was ridiculously easy to make - I mean, just throw all the stuff in a pot and cook - and it tasted delicious, more like something I'd spent at least an hour on.

Although I don't actually know the nutritional facts for this soup, I think it must be low in fat and in calories. The only thing that bumps up the calories/fat is the veggie potstickers. The potstickers certainly aren't required, but they did add some nice flavor and texture to the soup. I threw 6 into the pot and each of us had 2 in our bowls, but really it didn't add that much. I think this soup will become our go-to recipe for those nights when we're just too tired to think about cooking or we're in a rush. And the great thing is, you can keep playing with it every time you make it by making subtle changes to create new flavors.

Left-over Veggie Syndrome

I looked into the fridge this afternoon and noticed that we've got all these odds and ends and a shit-ton of veggie stock. I also noted that we have 4 containers of veggie ends waiting to be made into stock for next week. Eep! Stock overload!

I figured the easiest way to use up a quart or two of stock would be to just make some soup, but like I said, most of what was lurking in the fridge was sort of random. And so, voila, Random Soup was born! Honestly, 9 times out of 10 you do not need to hit up the food store when your pantry's getting low, you just need to switch on some creativity!

I wanted to serve a salad with my Random Soup so I started by roughly chopping up an onion, 3 carrots, 2 russet potatoes, some left over eggplant, garlic, and some Portland Winter Farmers Market goodies - a turnip, golden turnip, and rutabaga. I tossed them all into a roasting pan with some olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme and let them roast for about 1.5 hours, stirring every once in a while.

 Portland Farmers Market goodies: Olivia's Garden Greens, Turnip, Golden Turnip, Rutabaga, & some kind of potato that looks like a large version of fingerlings

After the soup was completed, I served it with the cooled root vegetables on top of Olivia's Garden greens, also from the Farmers Market. You could use some dressing if you want, but I think the flavors of the roasted veggies against the crisp salad greens are glorious and that a dressing would just cloud the flavors. 

Here's the soup recipe, but I didn't measure things so the measurements are just guestimates. I recommend you try making soup from the random odds and ends in your fridge too - it's pretty fun :o) 

Random Soup

1 onion, diced

1 carrot, sliced

1/2 eggplant, cubed

1 can black beans

1 can white beans

1-2 cups of kale, chopped

salt & pepper

cumin

turmeric

cayenne 

3/4 cup wild rice

Lots of veggie stock 

In a large pot, saute onion in olive oil until soft. Add carrot and cook until softened. Then add beans and eggplant - cook 1-2 minutes. Add kale last and cook until it turns dark green and has softened a little. Add spices to the saute mix and saute for a while until the flavors combine. Then add veggie stock followed by rice. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook for 30-60 minutes until rice has softened and flavors are combined. Add spices if needed. 

Caldo Verde

My boyfriend is away for the next two nights and I was home sick today so I thought it would be a good night to make nice comforting meal - soup of course! So I cooked up some Caldo Verde from Vegan on the Cheap, and it certainly did the trick.

The soup included Vegan on the Cheap's Smoky Tempeh Bits, though I didn't liquid smoke in my pantry to make it as the recipe calls for. I did, however, have a fresh package of Lalibella Farm's homemade tempeh in my fridge. So I modified the recipe. I'm not 100% happy with the results, mainly because I used the amount of soy sauce in the recipe without remembering to halve it (for some reason, all of the recipes in this book use an absorbent amount of soy sauce). 

So take the recipe and modifications and make your own changes and let me know what you come up with! Enjoy!

Caldo Verde - modified from Vegan on the Cheap by Robin Robertson

1 large onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1.5 lbs potatoes (the recipe calls for russet, but I used a mixed bag of gourmet which included red, purple, and yukon potatoes - and I must say make the soup look more colorful!)

8 cups veggie stock or water (make your own stock!)

1 tsp dried marjoram

1/2 tsp crushed red pepper

Salt to taste

1.5 cups cooked or 1 15.5 oz. can white beans, drained & rinsed

6 cups finely chopped kale

1/4 cup dry white wine

Pepper

1/2 cup Smoky Tempeh Bits (see recipe below)

In a large pot, heat olive oil over med. heat. Add the onion, and cook until softened, about 5 mins. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute longer. Add the potatoes, stock, marjoram, crushed red pepper, and about 1 tsp of salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 20 minutes. 

Stir in the beans. Taste and adjust the seasonings, if necessary. (You might need to add more salt if you used water instead of stock.) Keep the soup at a low simmer. 

In a large skillet, heat olive oil. Add the kale and the wine, if using. Season with black pepper to taste. Add 1/4 cup of the stock from the soup. Cook, stirring until the kale is wilted, about 5 minutes. Stir the kale mixture into the soup and simmer for 10 to 12 minutes or until the vegetables are tender and the flavors are well blended. 

When ready to serve, stir the tempeh bits into the soup. Serve hot. 

Smoky Tempeh Bits

8 oz. tempeh

3 Tbsp soy sauce

3 Tbsp water

1 1/2 tsp liquid smoke

1 Tbsp olive oil

In a medium saucepan of simmering water, cook the tempeh over medium heat for 20 minutes. Drain and pat dry. Crumble or chop the tempeh into small bits and set aside. In a small bowl, combine the soy sauce, water, and liquid smoke (I didn't have liquid smoke so I used the soy sauce, water and added some Dijon mustard. I liked the mustardy flavor but the soy sauce was very over-powering, so I'll need to play with this next time I make it!). Set aside. 

In a med skillet, heat oil over med-high heat. Add the tempeh and cook, stirring until nicely browned, about 5 minutes. Add the soy sauce mixture, stirring to coat the tempeh. Continue cooking until the liquid is absorbed and the tempeh is evenly coated. Remove from heat.

Cover and refrigerate or freeze what you don't use, until needed. Properly stored, it will keep in the fridge for 3-4 days or in the freezer 3-4 weeks

Valentine's Day Delight!

We stayed in for Valentine's Day because, let's face it, most resturants are jam-packed and many serve a "special," highly limited menu, which makes vegan options scarce. Besides, nothing says "I love you" like a homecooked meal!

I've been getting into stews, soups, and chowders lately. With the cold weather upon us, these hearty dishes warm us up in a jiffy. So last night we decided on Vegan Black Bean and Corn Chowder. One word: YUM. I packed some of the left over chowder for lunch today and had it cold - and even cold, it tastes delish!

Lunch: Left-over Chowder, Fresh cut veggies and a banana with peanut butter



Recipe? Here we go...this one's coming from my head so pardon any mistakes!

Vegan Black Bean & Corn Chowder
1 yellow onion
1 clove garlic
2 cans black beans, drained & rinsed
1 can fire-roasted tomatoes
1.5 cups frozen corn, defrosted
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp chili powder
salt & pepper to taste
3 cups of veggie stock (make you're own! it's EASY!)
1.5 cups textured vegetable protein

In a large pot over medium heat, cook onions & garlic in some olive oil. Cover and let them get soft, about 5 mins. Add beans, tomatoes, corn & spices. Add veggie stock and simmer. Taste and add salt & pepper to your liking. Add the TVP and let the chowder simmer, uncovered, for about 30-45 minutes. The TVP will soak up a lot of the juice, so it will look brothy at first but then get nice and thick. Add more stock if you need to thin it out. Serve hot!



I prepared the chowder, my boyfriend prepared the drinks: champagne with a hibiscus flower floating on the bottom and some hibiscus syrup mixed in - gloriously romantic. It was certainly a wonderful Valentine's Day meal :)

What a crock!

Sunday - I looked at my calendar for this week and felt anxious. A stressful work week, several after work obligations, etc. Something I've learned as I've embarked on this vegan journey is that I cannot just "wing-it" for dinner. I need a plan in place. Whether it's a recipe from our coveted Vegan on the Cheap, something we've made up in the past, or homemade pizza, I need a plan. So I looked at our busiest nights and the nights I thought, "Wow, I am not going to want to come home to cook" and I remembered my faithful old crock pot.

Now I had always thought that crock pots were for cooking meat balls, or sausage, or chili, or beefy stew. But low-and-behold, Vegan on the Cheap's got an entire slow-cooker section and just do a search on "slow cooker" on VegWeb and the possibilities are endless!

My yellow and maroon crock pot, handed down to my from my grandmother, was sitting below a shelf on our kitchen floor collecting dust. This old girl may not be new and flashy with all of the nicer amenities like a timer or alarm, but I knew she'd get the job done. I set my alarm for 6:20am the next day, hopped out of bed and threw a bunch of veggies into the deep marroon basin - onion, carrots, black beans, kale - some spices - cumin, salt, pepper, paprika - 5 cups of homemade veggie stock, and set the dial to low.

9 hours later, I'm greeted at the front door by a hungry crying kitty and an amazing aroma filling every space of our apartment. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to come home to the smell of food that's been cooking all day and know that all you'll need to do is wash the dishes. Exhausted from a long day at work, my boyfriend and I grabbed bowls and ate the hearty stew like Black Beans & Kale Soup while watching LOST in bed. A perfect end to a tiring day.