Category: Vegetable Adventures

Curried lentil-carrot-coconut-tomato-ginger-turmeric soup

This morning called for a bowl of warming soup and for deepening my joy about my newly arranged spice rack. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted lentil, carrot, or tomato soup, and so I decided to make one soup to rule them all! The real stars of the show are fresh ginger and turmeric roots; I bet you could make this with powder, but the fresh root is so delightful in color and taste. I also relied on Madras South Indian curry I ordered from World Spice Market.

I made this in the venerable Instant Pot, but I bet it would come out fantastic cooked on the stove. The thickness of the soup depends on how much water you add, and you can adjust it after it finishes cooking, before the blending stage.

Oh, by the way: I finally figured out the reason for the odious tendency of cooking websites to make you stroll through florid personal stories of wise elderly relatives, college exchange programs and exotic backpacking adventures, seventeen different pictures of each recipe, and detailed descriptions of the experience of eating it. You might already know this–I am a true neophyte to the ways of e-commerce and web traffic–but anyway, it turns out that one’s site fares better on Google et al. if you throw in a minimum amount of text and pictures. Thankfully, I’m in the fortunate position of having a day job and not making a cent off of sharing recipes with you, so I’ll stop torturing you and get to business. Be your own hero and make this soup!

1-2 tsp coconut oil
2 tbsp Madras South Indian Curry (or equivalent spices: Coriander, Brown Mustard, Turmeric, Cumin, Fenugreek Sd, Blk Pepper, Chile Flk, Cardamom, Indo. Cinnamon, and Ginger, totaling 2 tbsp)
5 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
1 1/2-inch knob fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1-inch knob fresh turmeric, peeled and minced
4 large carrots, sliced or cubed
1 small can of diced tomatoes
1/2 can coconut milk
2 cups red lentils
6-8 cups water

Set the instant pot to “sauté” and heat up the coconut oil. Add the curry spices and toast them in the pot for about 1 min. Add the garlic, ginger, and turmeric, and toast for another 30 seconds. Turn off the sauté function and throw in the carrots, tomatoes, coconut milk, lentils, and water. Set to “soup” (30 minutes of high pressure cooking). Allow pressure to release slowly. Open pot and use a ladle to move half of the contents to a blender. Add water to achieve desired thickness and blend until smooth. Return to instant pot and keep on “warm” until serving.

Green Vinaigrette

A nice, light, summery dressing for Buddha bowls and salads – pictured here with the little bowl I made for lunch. You can play with the relative amount of herbs or the kind of vinegar you use.

3 cups herbs: combination of parsley, cilantro, and mint
3 garlic cloves
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup water
pinch of salt

Blend and refrigerate.

Mango Chutney

Visiting my great-aunt Carmella always felt a bit like diving into an E.M. Forster or a Rudyard Kipling book. She and her late husband, Uncle Eli, traveled extensively abroad on account of his business, and each time they returned to Israel there was lots of stuff reminiscent of literary colonialism all over the place: African fabrics, wooden sculptures, ivory miniatures, soft pillows and throws, that sort of thing. Even the few objets d’art evoking similar connotations that my grandparents had (a spectacular person-sized Thai lamp comes to mind!) turned out to be gifts from Carmella. Carmella’s gorgeous condo in Jaffa was lavishly furnished with items from all over the world. Long before I learned about the ills and suffering wrought by British colonialism (to which I was a ridiculously late newcomer, given that I *lived* in former colonies, one of them British, all my life!) I tended to romanticize this exotic stuff, and so enjoyed the beauty of the Indian handcrafted goods and the chinoiserie.

Part and parcel of this exotic lavishness was the snack tray, which always featured terrific delicacies I’d never seen before: imported cheeses, savory tinned things with foreign packaging, fancy crackers, you name it. Nary a commonplace chocolate in sight. Once we showed up and were treated to a tray of cheeses and a magical jam-like substance. Carmella, who always spoke to you assuming you knew what she was talking about, saw my face light up after taking a bite, and nonchalantly said, “oh, you like the chutney?”

So *that’s* what this is, I thought. Now, whenever I read Forster or Kipling and someone mentioned chutney, I knew what they were on about. I far preferred it to jam, because it was sweet and sour and savory and spicy all at once. Later in life I read up a bit on the history of chutney and learned that many of the fruit preparations are not authentic Indian foods, but rather Indian-inspired European concoctions. Anglo-Indians at the time of the British Raj recreated Indian chutneys using English orchard fruits, such as sour cooking apples and rhubarb, and added raisins or other dried fruit.

Even though chutney is very easy to make, it would not have occurred to me to do so if we had not untimely polished off the jar of quince chutney that my friend Nancy makes over at Vermont Quince. If you can order it, you’re in for a treat, and if not, read on, make mango chutney, and be your own hero.

2 ripe and juicy mangoes, chopped into tiny cubes
1/3 red onion, very finely minced
4-5 garlic cloves, very finely minced
1/3 cup Thompson raisins
1/4 cup agave syrup
4 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 splash balsamic vinegar
3-4 square inches ginger, very finely minced
pinch of salt
pinch of cayenne

Mix all this in a small saucepan. Cook on medium-to-low heat for 30 minutes. Done.

I like eating this with cashew cheese on bread, but it goes with lots of things: rice, curries, mashed potatoes, crackers, chips. It keeps well in the fridge if stored in a sealed jar–the agave and vinegar help with preservation, which might be why British soldiers and civil servants carried it around and liked it so much.

Next time I make it, I’ll add toasted spices like cumin seeds, coriander, and nigella.

Focaccia

I used a fantastic recipe by Maurizio over at The Perfect Loaf. Because I’m not blessed/burdened with Maurizio’s memories of the focaccia he had as a child by the sea, I wasn’t attached to a particular flavor profile, and I very much wanted something with lots of tasty vegetables. I also wanted to put in some whole grains, which Maurizio does not use in this particular recipe.

Vegetables Korma

More pandemic cooking, and this time we’re flush with fresh produce because our friends at Albert & Eve came by yesterday with two bags full. We’ve been enjoying learning Indian cooking from Vegan Richa’s Indian Kitchen, and this time we made cauliflower, carrots and peas korma. I made a few adjustments to Richa’s excellent recipe to make it mild so that Rio would eat it. Big success!

As an aside, Richa’s terrific book is one of the two cookbooks we use most at home, the other one being Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen by Chloe Coscarelli. We have lots of great cookbooks, the vast majority of which are vegan, but at this point we have our kitchen style and recipes pretty much mastered, so we need cookbooks only to learn things we don’t know yet.

The recipe in the book is very much like this one from Richa’s website, but with a few important changes, and I made a few additional simplifications. I substituted the fennel seeds with poppy seeds to great success, omitted the chiles, and had carrots in lieu of potatoes. We were lucky that fresh peas are in season, but wanted lots of peas so defrosted a frozen pea bag. I made a few other tweaks to fit the pandemic pantry situation, and there ya have it:

sauce

1 tsp oil
1 small onion
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1 cup canned tomatoes
5 cloves of garlic
1 inch ginger
1 tbsp poppy seeds

Veggies:

3 cups cauliflower florets
1 cup sliced carrots
1 cup peas (frozen is great)
2/3 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup water

Heat up oil in big pan, slice onion thinly, add to pan with coriander and cumin, and sauté until golden. Finely mince garlic and ginger and add. Sauté for about 5 more minutes, then add tomatoes, and cook an additional five minutes. Then, add poppy seeds and cook for another 2 mins. Add cauliflower and carrots and mix. Add coconut milk and water, cover, and cook on medium-low heat for 15 mins. Add peas, mix again, and cook for another 15 mins. Great over rice!

Corn and Bean Salad

While some of us have cooked for our families for a long time, others are only now learning to cook, and the abundance of fancy, complicated recipes can be daunting. It’s also hard to hunt for expensive ingredients. Here’s something that can easily be made with fresh, canned, or frozen ingredients; it’s a particularly convenient dish in my part of the world, because our neighborhood grocers are well-stocked in inexpensive produce.

You’ll need exactly five ingredients: corn, red or black beans, onion, cilantro, and lime. If the corn is fresh, you can get it off the cob with a sharp knife and leave it raw in the salad. If it’s frozen, defrost it but don’t cook it for long. The beans can be cooked from dried or canned (either way, rinse them well and let them cool a bit before assembling.) The onion and cilantro have to be fresh, and the lime juice tastes great fresh but you can use bottled unsweetened lemon or lime juice in a pinch. Be sure to mince the onions very finely and add considerably less onion, volume-wise, than corn and beans.

Serve with raw fresh vegetables, if you have any on hand; I like this with steamed broccoli florets on the side, which you can slather in this amazing sauce.

Vegan Sourdough Waffles

The sourdough enthusiasm all around me is inspiring! People are coming over to get starter, measuring their ingredients in grams, having a blast… and eating delicious bread! Along the way, they are encountering all the confusing websites and Facebook instructions that those of us who are sourdough oldtimers have already coped with. One question that keeps coming up is – what to do with discard?

Lots of things! I have a killer recipe for vegan sourdough banana pancakes. But thankfully, we now have a waffle iron! I bought this little number as a stocking stuffer for Chad in December and it works like a charm. There are apparently lots of things to do with a waffle maker–this is the latest craze – so it’s a useful appliance to have around.

The recipe is lightly modified from the one over at Holy Cow. I didn’t add sugar, and I didn’t mix my flax eggs properly. I also find that, with an active starter, you don’t really need baking soda. Finally, I simply forgot the vegetable oil, and it turned out delectable nonetheless, so I guess it’s unnecessary! Here goes:

1/2 cup unfed sourdough starter
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup Oatly or other plant milk
1 tsp kombucha (that’s what I had at home; apple cider vinegar would be preferable)
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp flax seeds
6 tbsp water

The evening before you hope to have this memorable breakfast, mix starter, flour, plant milk and kombucha/vinegar in a large bowl. Leave covered overnight to rise. In the morning, mix seeds with water (our grinder broke, so I just left them whole and they added a nice nutty flavor to the waffles.) After five minutes, add the salt and the flax/water mix to the waffle mix. Heat up the waffle iron and cook waffles according to the waffle iron instructions. Serve with maple syrup, cashew cream, and fruit, or with savory toppings.

These keep phenomenally well in the freezer, and can be quickly reheated in the waffle iron, which restores their toasty texture.

Two Salads, One Sauce

With grocery trips getting stressful and fraught, we all try to play ingredient Tetris with whatever we have at home. Our vegetable inventory has dwindled, and even though we have a delivery coming from our friends at Albert & Eve on Tuesday, a shopping trip soon seems inevitable.

In the meantime, I’m doing some fridge archaeology, finding some cool things in jars and some nice frozen vegetables to use. Some of what I found was disturbing and unidentifiable to the point that it reminded me of the great Faith Petric’s When Did We Have Sauerkraut? but some was useful. It’s a good exercise to see how I can optimally use my leftovers to feed my family tasty and nutritious meals. It helps to have the magical Nama Shoyu Ginger Sauce on hand–instant salad joy.

The salad on the right was made on Friday, when we were a bit more flush on ingredients. The main ingredient is a packet of frozen peas. To that I added leftover quinoa, leftover Brussel sprouts, radishes, tomatoes, some herbs, spring onions (I dig the green parts), and mushrooms.

By the time this morning rolled in, things were a bit tighter, so I used cannellini beans, celery, tomatoes, celery, olives from a jar (shudder! they are horrible! I hope the sauce masks their awfulness), and the white part of the spring onion.

We’re so lucky to have even the ingredients we have! Vegetable drawer is empty now, but we still have oranges in a basket and dry grains and beans in the pantry. How’s your food Tetris going?

Adventures in Sourdough

Sheltering at home has encouraged people to pick up various cooking projects, and I hear a lot about new sourdough enthusiasts! I may have even helped one or two of them bake their first loaf. I’ve been baking sourdough for some years now and it’s been a marvelous learning journey; with every loaf I learn more about the science and art of the process and gain more respect for wild yeast.

The loaf in the picture, which I baked this morning, is actually what started the whole thing. I used to be very sensitive to wheat, until I discovered that I can eat long-fermentation sourdough breads to no ill effect. I then developed an expensive habit: the amazing oatmeal porridge loaf from Tartine Bakery. It made me feel a bit like a chump to stand in line for a $12 loaf (!!!), and so I decided to learn to bake bread and be my own hero.

If you’d like to start, particularly if you dig the idea of whole grains and seeds, I would strongly recommend picking up Tartine Book No. 3. It has the Tartine recipe for a starter, the recipe for a basic white country loaf, and many variations on the theme, including breads with porridges and sprouted grains. While you get an easier rise out of bread that is at least in part made with white bread flour, the loaves above are 100% whole grain: 1000g hard white wheat (whole grain) and 250g steel cut oatmeal (leftover from breakfast) with 800g water and 25g salt.

Many of my fellow sourdough enthusiasts swear by Elaine “Foodbod” Boddy’s master sourdough recipe. It’s easy and beginner-friendly, and her gear list is great, though I think the instructions neglect to properly teach shaping (a crucially important skill to put some surface tension on the loaf so that it rises nicely.) Here’s the gear I use with some common household substitutes:

Purpose	Gear I use and like	Solid substitutes
starter storage	nice handmade jar by Mark Campbell	any Tupperware. When you’re starting out, clear containers with a rubber band around them will help you see how much the starter’s risen)
flour storage	bins from The Container Store	any bin or bag.
dough mixing	any large kitchen bowl	professional bakeries use giant plastic bins. Anything really big you own will do.
cover	I have a couche, which is a bit heavier than a tea towel, and comes in handy if you ever want to make baguettes.	a tea towel will do just fine (that’s what I used in Cambridge.)
dough cutting	Even though I own a nice bench knife, I often just use my Cutco kitchen shears.	Kitchen shears will serve you well. You’ll notice that it is really hard and sticky to cut dough with a knife!
shaping	I use two well-floured cutting boards.	You can go fancy here and buy or make a baker’s bench. I don’t have one–a girl can dream!
storage	I use banneton baskets, which come in various sizes and shapes. I own a round one with a liner and an oblong one with a liner, both from Breadtopia. I put the full baskets in plastic bags to prevent the loaves from drying.	At Cambridge I simply used round kitchen bowls, and you can do the same, provided that you cover them with well-floured kitchen bowls.
inversion into baking vessel	parchment paper.	No substitutes here. I would not bake without it–it’s a nightmare to release a stuck loaf from a baking vessel–nor would I use wax paper, which is terrible and sticks to your bread.
scoring tool	bread lame and sharp razor blades	you can rig a nice lame from a razor blade and a cheap chopstick.
baking vessel	I bake my round loaves in a 3qt Cuisinart Dutch Oven and my long ones in a clay cloche from Breadtopia	You’ll need something that can withstand a 500F degree oven, and I’d recommend sticking to a 3-3.5qt size. This Lodge Combo Cooker, which I used when were were in Cambridge, is a great value.

If this seems like a big to-do, at the beginning it kind of is, but it tends to settle into your weekly routine quite nicely. I bake once a week and find that the starter does most of the work for me. 🙂 There are a few hours where it’ll want about 30 seconds of your attention every half hour or so, but other than that, a lot of it is about patience.

If you find yourself looking for a new project to embark on, this might be a fun one for you! Let me know how it goes.

Nama Shoyu Ginger Sauce (and lovely salad)

When we were in Cambridge, MA, in the fall, one of our favorite places to eat was a joyous hippie joint on Massachusettes Avenue called Life Alive. I loved everything they served–the thoughtfully planned bowls, their amazing miso soup with mushrooms, and their excellent juices and smoothies. What made everything better was that they slathered several of their dishes with an unbelievably tasty sauce. One of my major projects was to try and recreate that sauce in my own kitchen. Thankfully, many people are obsessed with this sauce, and one intrepid food blogger, SarahFit, has the winning formula, so–mission accomplished! Sarah, you have my eternal gratitude. Here it goes:

Recipe: That Amazing Ginger Sauce From Life Alive

The salad above consists simply of brown rice noodles (I like this kind, which I ordered in bulk for our household), tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, scallions, cilantro, parsley, and edamame. Cook noodles, rinse with cold water, mix with the vegetables (sliced or shredded to your liking), and slather with a generous amount of the magical sauce.

You can put this sauce on anything: it brightens bowls, asian fusion dishes, roasted vegetables, and even tofu scrambles. Go ahead and double (or quadruple) the recipe. You’re welcome.