My two-day vegan cleanse

So, I had some free time yesterday morning and did a little cooking to get Steve and me through the next couple of days.  After having just a little too much fun during my weekend off, it seemed like a good idea to take a temporary leave of animal products and alcohol.  Nothing major, just a couple of days of austerity to help me feel better.  To that end, I whipped these two things together before lunch:

Summer vegetable soup:

This is loosely based on the summer vegetable soup in my Greek cookbook (The Food of Greece p. 87).  It pretty much amounts to throwing things in the pot and letting them blend until you have soup.  Since we had yellow squash from one of Steve's recent trips to the store and I had radishes and herbs from the backyard, it was easy enough to take what was fresh and add a few more things that were either canned or frozen and throw them in a pot.  So...the soup bowl pictured above contains chopped yellow squash, onion, radishes, one diced cucumber (only because we had one, also from the backyard, and the Greek cookbook said it was okay) crushed tomatoes, about four cups of veggie broth, about a cup and a half of thawed lima beans from the freezer, a few sprigs of thyme, a few chopped basil leaves, lemon juice, salt and pepper.  This ended up being my lunch and Steve's dinner yesterday.

Pasta salad:

This is nearly the same as my usual pasta salad, except that I threw in a bunch of chopped Italian parsley from the backyard along with the artichoke hearts, tomatoes (grown and given to me by a patient's wife!) and sliced black olives.  The "dressing" was just some salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil that I drizzled over the pasta and veggies right before they went in the fridge.  I left the optional shredded Parmesan out of the batch but treated myself to the cheese-included helping shown here for lunch today.  So, between that and the yogurt-honey-peanut Balance bar I had for breakfast this morning, my vegan cleanse is officially over (until next time).
***

SO glad we finally got some rain last night and Monday.  It's been about six days, and I've got about five little sprouts so far of the spring mix seeds I planted last week.  Not bad, considering the package said it would take 10-14 days for sprouting to occur.  With any luck I'll be able to make salads with it before summer's out.  Both boxes of radishes are coming along nicely as well. 

Also, for those of you in Columbia who know and love the All-Local Farmer's Market: they've just announced that they're expanding and will also be open on Wednesday evenings from 4-8 p.m. starting August 24.  If you haven't already, go check it out!  For more info, click here:
http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992912064202144&ShowArticle_ID=12292607112412392

I've still got three yellow squash and two bags of spinach to dispense with in the next few days.  Check back to see what kind of ingeniousness I cook up next time to keep us fed and make good use of what's on hand!

Soup and Salad Sunday

Another recipe I've been thinking about and just now getting around to making.  I've been wanting to make something akin to minestrone, but since I didn't have any cannellini beans in the house (they often get used the day I buy them), I made do with a cup or so of dry lentils and some other things on hand.  This was a handy way to get rid of some carrots that have been hanging out in the fridge for over a week as well as one large onion from a bag purchased more recently.   The rest could have been used whenever, and today was as good a day as any.

Lentil soup:
2 tbsp Smart Balance
1 large onion, chopped
2 small carrots, peeled and sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp dried Italian herb mix
1 cup frozen green beans, thawed
4 cups vegetable broth
1 cup green lentils, rinsed and sorted
1 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes

Heat the Smart Balance over medium heat in a 2-3 quart saucepan.  Add carrots and onions and cook until softened, about 3-5 minutes.  Add garlic and herb mix and cook for another 2 minutes.  Add green beans and cook until warmed, another 2-3 minutes.  Add vegetable broth, lentils and tomatoes.  Stir, cover and simmer until lentils have cooked through, about 25-30 minutes.

And today's salad involved an ingredient I'd never used before: radish sprouts purchased at the All-Local Farmer's Market at the end of my 11-mile run yesterday morning! 

I've been meaning to check out City Roots as well, and, having seen their selection on Saturday, I can't wait to stop by their location this week for some more new veggies!

Spinach salad with black olives and radish sprouts:
2-3 handfuls fresh spinach, washed and torn
1 small bag (1 cup?) radish sprouts
1/2 cup sliced black olives, drained
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste

Assemble the first three ingredients, in order, on two salad plates.  In a small bowl, combine the next three ingredients and pour over the salad.

Good good stuff!  And I'm happy to actually have time to cook when I'm not too tired, like I was all day yesterday.  "Dinner" was me stuffing my face with hummus and spicy blue corn tortilla chips in front of the TV, catching up on 30 Rock and Outsourced.  Yay, Saturday night.

But I've got plenty of leftover soup to enjoy over the next couple of days, and tomorrow Steve and I will be celebrating Valentine's Day at Al's Upstairs!

Enjoy this lovely weather while it lasts!

Supreme Pizza Pasta

...minus the pepperoni and sausage.  Maybe I should have named this after the veggie lover's pizza, but that doesn't sound as fun.

I've had this idea for about a week and finally got around to making it tonight.  Why tonight, you may ask, when Friday's such a great night for going out and enjoying food prepared by other people? 

Because I plan on going to bed at the usual (early) time tonight, having consumed no sugar or alcohol this evening, so that I can get up tomorrow bright and early and embark upon a running tour of Columbia that will begin at my house in Northeast Columbia and end at the All-Local Farmer's Market on Whaley Street!  (Many thanks to Steve for agreeing to drive down there and meet me at my anticipated time of arrival.)

1/2 of a 1-pound box of whole wheat rotini pasta
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium-sized onion, chopped
1 cup frozen green bell peppers, thawed
1 cup frozen sliced mushrooms (as far as I know, only Publix has these in Columbia)
3 cloves chopped garlic
2 tsp dried Italian herb mix
crushed red pepper to taste
1 can diced tomatoes
1/2 of a 108 g can of Mario's sliced black olives, drained
15 manzanilla olives, cut in half crosswise

Bring 5-6 cups of salted water to a boil.  Add pasta and cook according to package instructions.

In a 2-quart saucepan, heat olive oil over medium heat.  Add onion and cook until softened, about 3 minutes.  Add garlic and green peppers and cook for another 3 minutes.  Add mushrooms, dried herb mix and crushed red pepper and cook for another 2-3 minutes.  Add tomatoes and raise heat as needed to boil off some of the liquid.  Stir in black and green olives. 

Serve when pasta is ready and sauce has reached the desired thickness.

***
I was even planning to garnish Steve's plate with some of the pepperoni slices he likes to snack on, but it turns out that he ate the last of them a day or two ago.  Oh, well.  A sprinkling of Parmesan or Romano also would have been nice, but I didn't want it enough tonight to grate it myself.  Next time?

Off to fall asleep in front of the TV and then get up tomorrow and blaze a trail from one end of this town to the other.  Good night!

Pasta salad with mustard vinaigrette

This is really dorky, but I was amazed to Google "Clock-Racing Gourmet" today and see the blog come right up!  And in other happy news, short runs with no IT band trouble are starting to be the norm again!

Nearly every pasta salad I've made from scratch is loosely based on the one they served at the last restaurant I worked at - the City Café inside the Bank of America building at Calhoun and Main.  Whereas theirs always had diced red bell pepper, scallions and black olives tossed in their house (balsamic) dressing, mine usually has the scallions and olives with tomatoes substituted for the peppers, and my usual dressing is Ken's Steakhouse Northern Italian dressing with some additional shredded parmesan to make it more filling.  Well, I was fresh out of the dressing and scallions on Sunday but still had dark green leeks and other condiments out the proverbial wazoo, so I opted to make the dressing as well as the pasta salad. 

8 oz. Barilla wheat spiral pasta
1-2 leeks (green tops only), sliced 1/4 inch
2 small tomatoes, diced
1 can large black olives, drained
1 tbsp spicy mustard
1.5 tbsp red wine vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
salt to taste

Cook the pasta according to package directions, then drain and rinse with cold water.  Combine the next 3 ingredients in a large bowl.  When the pasta is ready, add it to the bowl. 

In a smaller bowl, combine the mustard and winegar and then whisk in the olive oil and continue whisking until blended.  Stir the dressing into the pasta salad, cover and chill for at least two hours.  Check seasoning and add salt to taste before serving.

I found this last part especially important, because it tasted a little sour at room temperature.  Chilling it seemed to temper the dressing and also took the edge off the leeks, which can be as strong as yellow onions when they've just been chopped.  After checking the flavor after a couple of hours later, I had a better sense of how much salt (not as much as I expected) would be needed to deal with the flat acidic taste of the mustard vinaigrette.  It probably could have been added while I was making the dressing, but I try to err on the side of caution so as not to oversalt my food. 

Finally - something that takes next to no cooking that I can enjoy on a hot day!

Chicken cacciatore-style pasta

I was going to make this for lunch on Friday but met a friend for lunch at Pho-Viet instead.  One of the upsides of ordering their #31 (noodles, cabbage and tofu in broth) and always leaving hungry is that it left me more inclined to cook something substantial that evening.  Since I still had a carrot, a red bell pepper and some of the $1.99 rotisserie chicken (Steve's lightning-fast lunch breaks during the week had apparently consisted of big chunks of chicken breast ripped off the carcass and gobbled down between calls), I thought it would be easy enough to chop and drop those ingredients, plus some canned mushrooms and black olives, in a saucepan with some crushed tomatoes and herbs and let it do its thing.  And so it went:

2 tbsp olive oil
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp dried Italian herbs
1 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes
1 8-oz can of sliced black olives
1 8-oz can of diced portabella mushrooms
2 chicken thigh quarters, cooked, deboned and coarsely chopped

random pieces of chicken breast, cooked, deboned and coarsely chopped
8 oz. Barilla wheat spiral pasta
salt and pepper to taste

Heat olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat.  Add carrot and saute until slightly softened, about 3 minutes.  Add bell pepper and garlic and cook another 3-5 minutes.  Add crushed tomatoes, herbs, olives, mushrooms and chicken and cook until sauce has thickened and all ingredients are warm, another 5-7 minutes.  Check seasoning and add salt and pepper to taste.

Meanwhile, bring some salted water to boil in another pot.  Add pasta and cook until al dente, about 9 minutes.  Drain and serve with a generous helping of the sauce over the top on each plate.

Humble confession and word to the wise: this was great the night I made it, but I had the leftovers for lunch on Monday and gave myself a mild case of food poisoning:(  If you use leftover chicken in a casserole or sauce or whatever, immediately freeze any leftovers from that meal.  Oh, well - now we know why I only got a B in microbiology.  Now that I'm feeling well enough to cook again, I'll probably resume my meatless ways so as not to have a repeat occurrence.  More new recipes are on their way!