Sweet Potato and Red Pepper Soup with Broccoli Risotto

Well, I'm back, and happy (belated) 2012.  Hopefully some of you are still sticking to your New Year's Resolutions.  One of mine is to participate officially in the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart, which means that, unlike back in September, I've actually signed up to do the full three weeks instead of noncommittally seeing how long I can stand it.  I hung in for three weeks and change a few months ago, so I figure I can do it again.  One of the neat things about participating in the Kickstart is the daily emails from vegan celebrities: until today I assumed that Alicia Silverstone and John Salley (of Bulls, Lakers and Pistons fame) were their best-known celebrity spokespeople, but today's message of encouragement was from none other than Steve-O!  Did anyone else out there know he's a vegan?  I thought that was very surprising and cool.  Anyhoo...

Day 8 is winding down after a thoroughly enjoyable meal of soup and risotto.  The inspiration for the soup was in the current issue of the Vegetarian Times, and the risotto was inspired by the availability of broccoli in the fridge and arborio rice in the cupboard.  After working all weekend and having today off, I was finally able to make this happen, which also means that I have leftovers for later in the week!

Sweet Potato and Red Pepper Soup:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium-large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1" cubes
1 medium Russet potato, peeled and cut into 1" cubes
half of one large white onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper or to taste
2 red bell peppers, roughly chopped
6 cups vegetable broth
salt and cayenne pepper to taste
Spinach pesto for coulis (recipe follows)

Heat oil in soup pot over medium heat.  Add next three ingredients and stir well to coat with oil.  Saute for 7 minutes.  Add next three ingredients, stir and cook another 3-5 minutes.  Add bell pepper and broth, cover and simmer on medium-low until potatoes and peppers are tender, about 30 minutes.  Remove from heat and let cool, then puree in batches and return to pot.  Add salt and cayenne if desired.  Serve hot with a dollop of spinach pesto in the center of the bowl.

Spinach pesto:
2.5-3 packed cups baby spinach
1/4 cup pine nuts
4 cloves garlic
3 tbsp lemon juice
4 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Place first four ingredients in food processor and puree until smooth, pouring in olive oil through chute.  (Alternatively, just throw everything in your food processor or blender and puree until smooth.)  Add salt and pepper to taste and store in refrigerator until ready to use.

Broccoli risotto:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 1/3 cups arborio rice
1 bay leaf
4 cups vegetable broth
3 tbsp nutritional yeast
2 cups broccoli florets, steamed in microwave with salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in saucepan.  Once heated, add rice and bay leaf and stir well.  Saute for 3-5 minutes.  Add broth one cup at the time, stirring often, until all broth is incorporated and rice is creamy.  Turn off heat and stir in nutritional yeast.  Fold in broccoli and serve.

Thai red coconut curry stir-fry

I made this Tuesday night (leftovers were gone by lunch Wednesday) and I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.  It's been a very lazy week at home since I joined the sisterhood of hospital staff who worked on Christmas Day.

A couple of months ago, I made my first Thai coconut curry, based on a recipe I found online, and was disappointed enough with the result that I didn't bother to write about it.  I just ate the leftovers very sulkily at work over the next couple of days.  Later, I got a little curious about this "red coconut curry" that I'd heard about, looked for a recipe that seemed reliable, went out and got some Thai Kitchen red curry paste and some fresh veggies and got down to bidniss.

This recipe was my starting point, and the author helpfully suggests alternatives based on meat-eating status and availability of seasonal produce.  I replaced the chicken and chicken broth with tofu and veggie broth (and skipped the fish sauce), and my veggie selection was different as well.  I picked up a red bell pepper, some baby carrots and a head of broccoli and sliced up the last few mushrooms I had in a package from something else I'd made a few days prior (don't even remember anymore) and pretty much followed their instructions.  Oh, I also used lime juice instead of lemon and didn't worry about the basil.  When the stir-fry was ready (I took a picture of it in the pan because it was just so pretty!), I served it over a bed of rice noodles.  Delicious! 

Of course, if you're not a vegetarian, you could make it exactly as shown in the original recipe, but the nice thing about this and so many other recipes is that it lends itself to substitution.  Maybe try it with shrimp instead of chicken?  I dunno.  The only thing I'd say is that if you actually want to have leftovers, use slightly larger quantities of veggies and meat/tofu/whatever, because it cooks down a good bit and there was only one leftover portion for the next day's lunch.  (Guess who ate it?)  And if you use broccoli like I did, be sure to stir it in near the end, since it takes very little time to cook and you don't want it to be mushy by the time the dish is ready to serve.  I added the broccoli at about the same time as the cornstarch mixture, and it came out just right.

Well, this is probably it for 2011.  If you're in the Columbia area, I look forward to seeing some of you tomorrow morning at the Cold Winter's Day 5K or tomorrow night on Main Street, where George Clinton will be kicking off 2012 P-Funk style!

Stay warm and be safe, everyone!

Stuffed Portabella Mushrooms and Broccoli Risotto

Last night's dinner and today's leftovers.  I bought a package of portabella mushroom caps on impulse at Earth Fare early in the week, and stuffing them just seemed like the thing to do.  The original plan was to make a stuffing mixture out of spinach and breadcrumbs (the incidental ones from when I made my own croutons for our Thanksgiving stuffing), but I made the mistake of adding too much of the nasty Chardonnay from last Friday to dampen the breadcrumbs, and the result was...nasty.  I realized this just as I was getting ready to spoon it onto the mushroom caps and ended up scrapping it and starting over sans breadcrumbs.  It was just as well - I wasn't sure how much stuffing these mushrooms would hold with the gills intact, so I just chopped up the spinach as finely as I could and mixed in a little lemon juice, pepper and feta.

Spinach and Feta-Stuffed Portabellas:
3 Portabella mushrooms, stems intact
1/2 cup fresh spinach, finely chopped
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
pepper to taste
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Remove and finely chop stems from mushrooms.  Combine chopped stems with spinach, olive oil, lemon juice, pepper and about half (1/4 cup) of the feta cheese.  Spoon onto mushrooms, packing it with spoon.  Top mixture with remaining feta cheese, place on greased (or foil-covered) cookie sheet or shallow baking pan in oven for 20 minutes.

The risotto seemed as good a pairing with the mushrooms as any, plus I haven't made it in a while.  This didn't use anything out of the fridge except some veggie base, but it was still an easy side dish to whip up while the mushrooms were in the oven.

Broccoli Risotto:
2 tbsp Smart Balance or Earth Balance
1 cup onion, chopped (I thawed some chopped onion from the freezer)
1 cup arborio rice
3 cups vegetable broth (I used Better than Bouillon vegetable base)
1 cup frozen broccoli florets, thawed
1/2 cup freshly grated Romano cheese
fresh ground pepper

In a 2-quart saucepan, heat the Smart Balance over medium heat.  Add onion and saute until softened, about 3 minutes.  Stir in arborio rice and cook for one minute.  Begin adding hot broth to the rice mixture 1/2 cup at a time, stirring often, until the rice has absorbed that amount of liquid.  Repeat until the rice has absorbed all the broth.  Broccoli may be added at this point or at the same time as the last addition of broth.  Stir in Romano and pepper and serve.

Next up: something to dispense of all the parsley, cilantro, red cabbage and carrots in the bottom drawer...

Steve's Birthday and Week in Review

Hmm...blogging more than once per week is turning out to be easier said than done.  I suppose that if this blog covered more than cooking, like my workouts and restaurant experiences, I'd have more to blog about.  As it turns out, last week's sambhar plus some other leftovers carried me into the middle of the week, so I quit cooking for a while so I could dispense with the leftovers.  By Thursday, I was getting too busy to cook again, so I actually ate frozen dinners, like, three nights in a row.  By Friday I decided that I was sick of frozen and I wanted to cook, so I skipped yoga in order to stay home and replay the sweet potato spinach praram.  Excellent fuel for the 10-mile run I did on Saturday morning!

For Saturday's lunch, I borrowed this recipe for garlic greens and white beans (pictured above) to finish off a big bag of kale but substituted black-eyed peas for the white beans because that's what I had in the cupboard.  And Romano cheese instead of the Parmesan, not that there's much difference between the two.


I didn't cook again over the weekend because we had ample lunch leftovers and we dined out on Saturday, Sunday and Monday for our birthday weekend - my birthday was yesterday, and Steve's is today.  So...I cooked for Steve and presented a couple of options for which I had already grocery shopped.  Steve's preference was the Chinese hot pots, so that's what I made.  The only deviations from this recipe were that I made it vegetarian (skipped the chicken pieces and used Better than Bouillon vegetable base instead of chicken broth) and made about a third of this recipe, since I didn't know how well any leftover rice stick noodles would keep.  I also added broccoli and cilantro as recommended in this spicy Thai soup recipe.  It turned out well, and for having over a dozen ingredients, it came together pretty fast.  Which was good, since we were both hungry early this evening.

Soon to come...more seasonal veggie goodness!

Get Him to The Greek

Sunday's dinner.  We had two heads of broccoli and one eggplant ready to be rotated out of my veggie stock, so I figured I'd also use up the last of our frozen whiting filets on a Greek-style dinner (always an easy choice).  All of the recipes are in The Food of Greece by Vilma Liacouras Chantiles.

Whipped eggplant:

1 largish eggplant (about 1 pound)

1 tbsp Earth Balance

1/4 cup warmed milk (optional)

pinch of nutmeg

salt and pepper to taste

Cut eggplant in half lengthwise and bake in oven at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.  Scoop pulp from skins into a bowl, mash with a fork (or puree in a blender; remove any pieces that don't want to mash) and stir in remaining ingredients.

Fish baked in paper:

4 whiting filets, thawed

1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley

2 tbsp lemon juice

6 bay leaves

1 tbsp capers

salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients and marinate in the fridge while the eggplant's baking.  Raise heat to 375 degrees.  Place two filets on parchment paper and wrap so that outer folds are down (or tie with kitchen string).  Repeat with remaining two filets.  Place both packages on a shallow baking pan and bake for 15 minutes.  Discard bay leaves when serving.

Lemon-pepper broccoli:

2 heads broccoli, stems removed

2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

Place broccoli flowerets in a microwave-safe bowl, cover with a paper towel and microwave on high for two minutes.  Stir in remaining ingredients and serve.

This was another of those that sounds like a lot but was easy to get done in the time it took to bake and then mash the eggplant, about 50 minutes total.  And since Steve had picked up the Get Him to The Greek DVD at Walmart on Friday, we had to watch it Sunday night.  It was better than I expected, but I would not recommend it to the Bambi or Eat Pray Love crowds.

Coming soon...more adventures in new veggies!

BBQ chicken and cilantro-lime broccoli

Sounds pretty random, but I had a head of broccoli and two bunches of cilantro to use up.  Steve and I like to prep simple meals before we go camping: I typically marinate some veggies that can easily be transferred from a plastic container to a foil wrapper that sits on our portable grill, and Steve will either pick up some chicken/turkey dogs or figure out something else.  This weekend it was boneless, skinless chicken breasts with Bull's Eye barbeque sauce.  The exact preparation was:

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 8 oz. each)
1/2 cup Bull's Eye barbeque sauce
1 head of broccoli
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp lime juice
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Poke holes in the chicken with a fork or a very sharp knife.  Brush on the barbeque sauce and store in plastic containers in the fridge (or cooler) for at least two hours.

Cut the broccoli florets away from the stems.  Peel the stems using a vegetable peeler and then cut into 1/2 inch dice.  Place all broccoli pieces in plastic storage container, add next four ingredients and stir well to combine.  Chill for at least two hours.

...and here we interrupt this recipe to report that it didn't get cooked on the grill as planned.  See, when we got to the campground, it turned out that someone was having a birthday party and grilled hot dogs for everyone who had taken a gamble on the 40 percent chance of rain to be there.  So, we filled up on hot dogs and kept our food in the cooler until we got home.  When we got home, we stopped into Yesterday's for lunch, and then it rained all afternoon.  Since I haven't yet gotten around to building the covered deck I've always wanted, Steve reconsidered the grilling-at-home option we had discussed and threw everything in the oven during the last 45 minutes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Great movie to watch on a stormy day!

...so the actual cooking went something like this:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and line a shallow baking pan with foil.  Wrap broccoli pieces in foil.

Bake chicken for 15 minutes at 350 degrees (put broccoli in the oven at the same time).  Remove broccoli (leave wrapped at room temperature), raise oven temperature to 375.  Bake chicken at 375 for another 7-8 minutes.  Put the broccoli back in the oven and lower the temperature back to 350.  Bake chicken until done at 350 degrees (about 10 more minutes).

Steve and I also had a brief discussion about how, uh, anemic this photo looked with all the empty space on the plate.  (It really wasn't a problem at the time, since Yesterday's doesn't serve up a dainty helping of anything.)  Maybe, with his guidance, future plates will be photographed with little radish flowers on them?

I'm not usually a fan of the sweeter BBQ sauces, but this plate was better off for it since the broccoli was more tart and would have been overkill with a vinegar-based sauce.  I'm thinking that one of these days I'll use the remaining Bull's Eye sauce to make baked beans.  Labor Day weekend, perhaps?...

9 Veggies, 1 Soup, 1 Salad

After returning from a weekend camping trip, on which our food stores typically consist of pre-cooked chicken or turkey sausage, buns, Goldfish, Pop-tarts and pistachios, I noticed that I still had a ton of produce that might have been fun to bring along had our cold storage space not been mostly taken up by beer.

So…on hand I had a few beets, a trimmed bunch of mustard greens, one small head each of broccoli and cauliflower, spring onions, a few tomatoes, one cooked, husked and chilled ear of corn and a couple of carrots. Since I’m not able to cook every night of the week and didn’t want to spend all Sunday afternoon in the kitchen making several things to be consumed during the week, I took the easy way out and threw everything into a soup pot with a few cups of water and some partially cooked chana dal (dried split chick peas, available at Indian grocery stores). Here's what it looked like.


I have to say I was a bit disappointed in how much sweetness the beets added to the mix. Given the chance to do it all over, I think I would have nuked and then chilled the diced beets and then used them in a spinach, corn and feta salad served as part of a soup-and-salad combo. I might have also added a can of tomato paste or sauce for additional thickness and flavor. That said, here’s the soup-and-salad that I did end up making and what I used:


Corn and feta salad

This recipe is based on a cold side dish I used to enjoy at the now-defunct Birds on a Wire restaurant, located on Devine St. in Columbia until 2008 or 2009. Since the food was generally mediocre and the service worse, the only reason I really have for missing them is that I never learned how to make their black bean cake. Here’s a take on their corn and feta salad:

One ear fresh corn, baked with husk on and chilled
3-4 oz. feta cheese, crumbled
green onions from one bulb of spring onions or one small bunch, sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp lime juice
pepper to taste

Once the ear of corn has chilled, peel off the husk and cut off the kernels with a serrated knife and discard the cob and husk.

Place the corn kernels in a mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients and stir until blended. Spoon onto small plates and serve. (Serves 2-3)


Indian Sambhar-style mixed vegetable soup
For most of my Indian cooking, credit needs to be given to Alamelu Vairavan, whose Healthy South Indian Cooking** book I found in the book shop of the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2006. None of her sambhars, not even her Mixed Vegetable Sambhar (p. 175), actually call for this many veggies. However, given the consistent list of spices, I figured the basic configuration would allow for additions and substitutions.

4 cups water
1 cup (dry) chana dal*, pre-soaked for one hour
salt to taste
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 tablespoons urad dal*
2 tablespoons black mustard seeds*
2 large carrots, peeled and diced into ¼ inch cubes
4 small beets, peeled and diced into ¼ inch cubes
4 spring onion bulbs, chopped
1 head of broccoli (stems removed), chopped
1 head of cauliflower (stems removed), chopped
1 bunch mustard greens (12-15 large leaves), chopped into bite-size pieces and washed in several changes of cold water
3 medium tomatoes, peeled and diced
1 tbsp sambhar powder* (like a mild curry powder)
Cayenne pepper to taste
*Can be purchased in Indian grocery stores.

Drain and rinse pre-soaked chana dal. Boil 4 cups of water in a 2-quart saucepan and add chana dal plus 1 tsp salt and turmeric. Cook covered for 20-30 minutes or until soft.

Heat the canola oil in an 8 qt pot over medium heat. When hot, but not smoking, add mustard seeds and urad dal. Cover pot and cook until mustard seeds pop and urad dal turns golden brown.

Add carrots and beets, stir and cook for 5 minutes. Add spring onions, stir and cook another 2-3 minutes.

Add broccoli and cauliflower, stir and cover for another 2-3 minutes.

Add cooked chana dal with their water and about 4 cups more water. Add tomatoes and mustard greens, pushing the greens down into the water with a large spoon. Stir in sambhar powder and cayenne (and more salt if needed), lower heat and simmer, covered, for 15 more minutes or until mustard greens have wilted.

Unsolicited testimonial: Steve was polite. To my pleasant surprise, given how seldom he eats corn by choice, he actually seemed to like the corn and feta salad. This ear of corn wasn’t especially sweet, so the kernels provided texture and just enough sweetness to complement the scallions and feta. Comments for the soup included “it’s pretty good” and something about each bite bursting with vitamins. Again, I found the beets to be a bit out of place in this soup because of the sweetness they added. Thankfully, they did not (at least not until the leftovers sat in the fridge overnight) discolor every other ingredient as I’d feared – just a few of the onions and carrots they cooked with in the beginning. Had I left out the beets, Indian spices and about half the greens and added tomato sauce and some Italian herbs, this actually would have made a great vegetarian minestrone. Will definitely make this again – just not the exact same way.

**Vairavan, A. and Marquardt, P. Healthy South Indian Cooking. New York: Hippocrene, 2001. ISBN 0-7818-0867-7