Soup Tip: Mashed White Beans

Last night, by chance, I came across a really neat soup-thickening tip. I wanted to make a vegetable soup, and hoped to add some bean power to it, but didn’t have any cooked, thawed beans, and cooking some would take a long time. Happily, I had about a half-pint of the white bean spread my grandma used to make, and I just added it to the soup pot. The result: a rich, hearty soup, with just the hint of fragrant beans and lots of vegetables. It pays off to make a huge amount of the bean spread and then use part of it as soup base. Here are instructions for making the bean spread and for using it in soup:

2-3 cups white beans
1 onion
a bit of olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Soak beans overnight, or in boiling water for an hour. Then cook until tender. While the beans are cooking, slice and caramelize the entire onion in a bit of olive oil. Transfer beans to blender with half of the caramelized onion and some of the cooking water (enough to reach the desired consistency, which is hummus-like.) Blend till smooth, then transfer to container, salt and pepper to taste, and mix in the remaining half onion. Good in sandwiches, tortillas, as a standalone dish for a multi-dish lunch, etc.

For the soup, I used:

1 package red chard, coarsely chopped
1 package kale, coarsely chopped
10 cherry tomatoes, halved
2 big carrots, cubed
1/2 onion
3 cloves garlic
pinch of chili
pinch of oregano
pinch of sage
1 cup white bean spread

Place all vegetables in soup pot and cover with water. Mix in 1 cup of white bean spread. Cook until vegetables are tender. yum!

My Inaugural Paella

After being served this wonderful paella a couple of weeks ago, I could not wait to start experimenting with my own. Despite the wonderfulness of having an enormous pan for guests, I figured we’d get more mileage out of a smaller pan, and fortunately La Paella has pans of any size you can think of. And they deliver!

The paella I made is very similar to the one my friend served me, except for a few changes: I halved the recipe because of the differently-sized pan and added a half-cup of chickpeas. I used pre-soaked, short-grain brown rice to improve nutrition (the taste was not compromised in the least). Since I had no artichokes, I topped it with lightly steamed baby courgettes (aren’t they pretty?). And, I also sauteed king oyster mushrooms, which have the look and texture of calamari. It was stunningly delicious and I look forward to inventing more variations.

In other news, I happened upon an estate sale in my neighborhood. Beyond the joys of all the neighbors rummaging through furniture and appliances and chatting excitedly, I was chuffed to find ten beautiful porcelain teacups with botanicals with matching saucers–not a set, each different, but incredibly cute. The whole lot, gold leaf and roses and pansies and all, cost me $20. I look forward to hosting a mad hatter party with vegan pastries soon!

Kalenta

It’s polenta. With kale. And pesto. And a bit of vegan butter and salt. What’s not to like?

1 bundle dino kale
1/2 cup coarse cornmeal
2 cups water
2 tbsp pesto
1-2 tsp vegan butter
salt to taste

Start by placing all the kale in the food processor and process fairly thoroughly.

Then, read this. Apparently, a lot of the polenta punctiliousness out there is completely unnecessary. No need for boiling water, constant stirring, and the like.

Place two cups of water in a wok over medium heat. Gradually whisk in polenta and processed kale. Whisk until the polenta begins to thicken, then reduce the heat to very low. Add pesto and stir every few minutes, until polenta thickens more and separates from the sides of the wok. That means it’s nearly done, and it’s time to stir in some vegan butter (I’m using this wonderful new thing, but Earth Balance would work just fine) and sprinkle a bit of salt. When the polenta reaches the desired consistency, you’re done!

If you want the polenta to harden so it can be beautifully sliced, you can put it in a serving dish (like the one I have above) and set it aside for a bit, or put it in the oven with the light on. After about 10-15 minutes you can slice beautiful polenta triangles or rectangles. We ate this with a nice green salad and some simply cooked pinto beans.

Restaurant Recommendation: Herban Fix in Atlanta, GA

The meal I had today at Herban Fix, a vegan chef restaurant in Atlanta, has to rank as one of the most memorable meals I ate in my entire life. Everything was delicious, prepared with incredible care and creativity, and served with grace and kindness in a large but cozy room decorated in impeccable taste.

We started with two appetizers. The sweet pea ravioli is served in a wonderful, slightly spicy sauce, with some edamame, and stuffed with tender pea shoots and other wonderful flavors. And the mock duck, which appears to be made of yuba (but I’m not sure) is served in little steamed buns with fresh vegetables, alongside a lovely plum sauce. 
For our main courses, we had crispy mushrooms, in an airy-light tempura batter, atop some wilted spinach, and an incredible pom-pom mushroom steak served on baby bok choy in a gorgeous and not-too-heavy mushroom gravy.

And for dessert, we were served a strawberry-coffee cake. It was very tasty, not to mention beautiful, topped with nice cashew cream, and the only reason I wish I hadn’t ordered it is that the entrees were so good that I wish I’d stuffed my face with another one!

Vegetable Paella

After a long hosting stint, it was nice to be invited to have dinner with friends. It was a good, avid-meat-eating friend’s birthday, and the meal was to be cooked by his wife, whose cuisine leans a lot on her Argentinian heritage. I asked what to bring, and our host said she was planning on tapas and paella. I assumed the paella would be roaming with little creatures that are far more glorious dancing in the water than killed and cooked in rice, and so made stuffed mushrooms and hummus and brought those with me in addition to the wine.
I underestimated my friends’ kindness and consideration. Our host walked us through the tapas; there were charcuterie and cheese and shrimp, but also olives, mushrooms, marcona almonds and a nice bread. And then the piece-de-resistance was brought out: a vegan paella, chock full of colorful bell peppers and decorated with artichoke globes! What an enjoyable meal. For dessert, she made tiramisu, but quietly placed a little platter of fresh apple slices and nuts near us.
Fortunately, our friends were gracious enough to let me photograph the gorgeous piece-de-resistance and give me the recipe (from the book Paella Paella). You’ll need a large paella pan – characterized by its size and flat base
1/4 cup olive oil
1 large yellow onion, minced
5 cloves of garlic, minced
4 cups vegetable broth
2 cups arborio rice (if I were to make this at home, I’d probably switch to short-grain brown rice, like sukoyaka genmai, and increase the broth amount to 5-6 cups)
1 small red pepper, cut into strips
1 small yellow pepper, cut into strips
1 small green pepper, cut into strips
4 medium tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 cup frozen peas, defrosted
2 cups artichoke hearts, tough leaves removed, and quartered
1 lemon
Heat oil in paella pan and saute onion and garlic. Meanwhile, bring broth to a simmer in a separate pot. Pour the rice into the paella pan and saute for 3 minutes. Add peppers and tomatoes and saute for an additional 3 minutes. Add the simmering broth to the pan and cook for 20 more minutes, or until almost tender and most liquid has been absorbed (note that you might have to rotate the pan if your burners don’t line up under the whole thing). Stir in the peas. Then, sprinkle artichoke hearts with lemon and arrange in an attractive pattern on top of the paella. Continue cooking until tender and all liquid is absorbed.

How to Feed Six People for Seven Days of a Holiday Visit

We’re in the home stretch of a long and labor-intensive hosting stint – four guests for seven days! And we’re fairly proud of the food we’ve served. I figured this post might be helpful to you if you’re planning on feeding people plant-based holiday food of high quality over the course of several days. You’ll notice that this plan relies on some leftover action, but we rework the leftovers so that they’re delicious and unrecognizable, and there’s always something new.

Things to do in advance, beyond shopping, include making a large quantity of almond yogurt and baking lots of pumpkin breads in mini bundts, freezing them. You can defrost one or two every night in the fridge, then pop it in the oven in the early morning to serve warm before glazing it.

Breakfasts and Brunches

Almond yogurt (save 2-3 tbsp every day to use for the next day’s batch)
Pumpkin breads (we baked them in mini-bundt pans, so we could defrost one or two every day)
Cashew-orange glaze
Compote (we made it with lots of prunes)
breads, granola, fresh fruit, dried fruit and nuts
coffee, tea, juice

Dinners and Special Meals

Wednesday night

Vegetable and white bean soup (similar to this one, with white in lieu of pinto beans)

Thursday night

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms (make a lot of brown rice and reuse Sunday night, if you like)
Rosemary Gravy
Cranberry Sauce (simmer fresh cranberries in orange juice with a bit of maple syrup)
Mashed Potatoes
Roasted Brussels Sprouts (halve them and massage with a bit of olive oil and cider vinegar; roast in a 350 oven until golden and crispy)
Green Salad
Chocolate Pots de Creme
Mulled Cider

Friday night

Mini burgers
Potato croquettes
Grilled vegetables
Tahini (mix raw tahini with lemon juice, minced garlic, and parsley, and drizzle on grilled eggplant)

Saturday Night

Mushroom and caramelized onion ravioli (purchased at Rainbow Grocery) in mushroom-alfredo sauce
fresh tomato bruschettas (slice two big tomatoes in half; squeeze out juice; stick flesh of tomato in blender with two onion cloves; toast some good quality bread and spoon tomato mix on them; decorate with ribbons of basil)
Green salad

Sunday Night

Stir-fried bok choy (garlic, ginger, sriracha, soy sauce – you know the drill)
Brown rice
Dark lentil stew
Romanesco broccoli – simply steamed with some lemon squeezed on top
Blondies with nibs and raisins
Coconut ice cream

Monday Night

Cabbage Rolls: I modified the recipe some. We have leftover rice and masoor daal, and I fried up an onion, added the rice and daal, and about 1 cup of minced seitan. I threw in Bragg’s liquid aminos and liquid smoke, placed the mix in the food processor for a few seconds to combine better, and used that to stuff the cabbage rolls.
Baked potatoes and sweet potatoes topped with some Miyoko’s Cheese
Cauliflower-chickpea-olive salad
Vegetable salad (cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions, radishes, lemon juice and a splash of olive oil)

Snacks

Serving people two giant meals a day, cooked from scratch, is a lot of work for you. You can lay out these snacks at lunchtime and invite people to make their own sandwiches.

Good quality bread
hummus, tahini
Miyoko’s Kitchen cheeses
Chao Slices
Field Roast deli slices
fresh oranges and tangerines
fresh cucumber sticks and tomato slices

Rosemary Gravy (and ravioli sauce)

This comes straight from Chloe Coscarelli’s Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen, where it accompanies the stuffed portobello mushrooms. I made a few minor adaptations.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
5 mushrooms, or stems of portobellos from other recipe
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups water
3 tablespoons Bragg’s
2 garlic cloves
1 tbsp rosemary
salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in saucepan and saute onion and thinly chopped mushrooms. Add yeast and flour and whisk for 2 minutes. Add remaining ingredients and continue to whisk until very thick. Transfer to blender and puree until smooth.

And there’s a bonus: if you make this with mushrooms it works wonderfully as a ravioli sauce. All you need to do is whisk the prepared gravy, or whatever’s left of it, with an equal amount of cashew milk.

Cashew-Orange Glaze

I served a lot of mini-bundt pumpkin cakes this week, and I find they go exceedingly well with this simple and delicious glaze. Here’s what you do:

1 cup cashews
1/3 cup water
2 tsp maple syrup
2 tbsp orange juice
1 tsp orange zest

Place all ingredients in blender and blend until smooth. Keeps beautifully in the fridge for several days. I can see how this would be a perfect glaze for a carrot cake, too.

Mini Burgers

I’ve already posted a few versions of mini burgers, such as here and here, but this one might be my best yet, and I discovered it entirely by mistake. On Christmas Eve, we made Chloe Coscarelli’s stuffed portobellos and were left with four of them (ten shrooms; six guests). You can, of course, make this from scratch, but I’d recommend this as the next-day meal after you make the mushrooms.

The only additional ingredient you need is about a half-cup of seitan. Place the stuffed mushrooms–stuffing, tomato, and all–in the food processor with some seitan and process until smooth. Make two-inch burgers and grill them with some vegetables. I can totally see taking the mix to a picnic, in a tupperware, and forming and grilling the burgers in situ.

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

This recipe was our piece-de-resistance for Christmas dinner, and we made it following the instructions in Chloe Coscarelli’s Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen with small modifications: the addition of a bit of minced seitan and a change in spices. I’m reproducing it here, but strongly advise all of you to buy the book, which has many more wonderful recipes!

2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
1 cup cashews
4 garlic cloves
1 cup cooked brown rice
2 cups cooked lentils
1/2 cup seitan
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 cup vegetable broth (we used the broth in which the seitan was stored)
1 tbsp Herbs de Provence
10 portobello mushrooms
1 tomato

Preheat oven to 350 and drizzle baking sheet with olive oil. Remove gills and stems from mushrooms and thinly mince. Heat up olive oil in a pan, slice up the onion and fry them up with the cashews until translucent. Add garlic continue sauteeing a few more minutes.

Transfer onion mixture into bowl and add rice, lentils, chopped up seitan, broth, breadcrumbs, and spices.

Brush both sides of each mushroom with a bit of oil, place in one layer on baking sheet, and generously spoon stuffing on top of each. Place a thin slice of tomato on each mushroom. Place baking sheet in oven and bake for about 30 minutes.

We had four leftover mushrooms, which we used to make mini-burgers for the next day. Stay tuned!