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).
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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!

Fun with radishes

Here are my radishes - the first veggies I ever grew from seeds!

I was pretty anxious to use them once they were out of the ground and washed, because I've noticed in the past that radishes can dry out after just a few days in the fridge.  So, I replayed the radish sambhar recipe here but left out the bell pepper (didn't have any), used more radish than the recipe called for (all the ones pictured above) and used extra yellow split peas in place of the toor dal that I was fresh out of.  I also had a bunch of cilantro that all went in at the end.  Word to the wise: when making any recipe using yellow split peas plus veggies, start cooking the yellow split peas about 15 minutes before the rest since they take a while to soften completely (about 45 minutes).  Here's how it turned out, served over brown rice:

I also figured I'd be cheating myself if I didn't come up with a use for the greens as well.  I have a recipe on file for a pureed radish green and potato soup, but another use came to mind that also allowed me to dispense of half a block of tofu, a package of mushrooms, a zucchini and about four carrots that I had no other plans for: the hot pots that I first made back in January for Steve's birthday.  The broth was pretty much the same as before.  The rest included sliced mushrooms, zucchini and carrots cut into matchsticks, cubed tofu, the last of my rice stick noodles and radish greens sliced into ribbons.  I sauteed the carrots to soften them up a little before assembling the dish. 

Yummy as always, with or without sriracha!

This week's looking like it will be too hot for soup, so be on the lookout for some sort of salad recipe that will use at least one ingredient from the garden.  Stay cool everybody!

Thanksgiving Throwdown

I know I'm far from the only person who cooked yesterday and the day before, but for me, Thanksgiving is the culinary holiday to end all, and I want to share with everyone what I made!

I don't have anyone to cook for besides Steve, and the holiday always sneaks up before I'm ready to even think about entertaining, so I usually don't.  Nevertheless, I've been cooking a real Thanksgiving dinner every year since I moved into my house - mainly because I wanted to see if I could do it, and partly so that I'll have some experience with it should I ever find myself contributing food to extended family gatherings during the holidays (a task that, for now, mostly falls to my dear Aunt Kaye in Chesapeake, VA).  For years I worried that I'd find myself married and having to cook for in-laws from hell without ever having made a turkey or pork tenderloin before, undercooking the meat and sending everyone to the emergency room with food poisoning.  So, I've rehearsed for such an occasion four years in a row now and (to my knowledge) not made anyone sick.

So here's how I spent my day yesterday!

Turkey with herbs and citrus

This is the turkey recipe I've followed each year.  For the most part, this was the same as Giada's recipe.  The main differences are that I doubled the "butter" and olive oil and used Earth Balance instead of butter for the butter-olive oil-herb mixture for the skin.  Since Earth Balance is pretty salty, I skipped salt here.  Also, I didn't have any herbes de Provence on hand, so instead I used a dried Italian herb mix consisting of oregano, rosemary, basil, marjoram and sage.  Close enough for rock 'n roll.  I stuffed the cavity with the orange, lemon, onion and herbs and rubbed the butter-oil-herb mixture on the skin the day before and left it in the fridge overnight.  Where the recipe says to add broth and herbs and throw it back in for 40 minutes, I went up to an hour for peace of mind (the cook time in this recipe has never seemed quite long enough for a 15-pound bird, so I leave it a little longer at each step) and because I had sweet potatoes and stuffing in the oven at the same time.  I didn't use low-sodium chicken broth as recommended, so where it says to add one final cup of broth to the roasting pan, I just added water.  This can get really salty if you're not using the low-salt and salt-free items indicated.  When it was finally ready to come out of the oven, I made the gravy pretty much the same as in the recipe, except that where it says to spoon off the fat from the strained pan juices and then cook some butter and flour, I spooned off the fat (green in color from the olive oil), put that in a saucepan and whisked in some flour, followed by the rest of the pan juices and additional chicken broth.  The greenish-brown color of the roux changed to a normal light-brown gravy color as soon as I added the de-fatted pan juices and broth.  This also needed no additional salt, so when it was ready to serve I just added pepper.  Num-num!

Carrot and fennel stuffing

I decided this year that I'd had enough of Emeril's cornbread and andouille dressing recipe - it's a good meal all by itself (hot Italian turkey sausage is a good substitute for the andouille), but very complicated when you're working on other dishes.  Instead, I went hunting for simpler recipes and found this one, which gave me an excuse to go to the store and pick up some fennel.  I did use carrots but skipped the apricots because a) I wasn't dying to have them, and b) Wal-Mart didn't have any when I went looking for them last weekend.  No biggie - it was good with all the other veggies.  The biggest difference between this recipe and what I actually made, besides the absence of apricots, is that I didn't use a baguette.  I happened to have a loaf of Pepperidge Farm buttermilk bread in the freezer, so I toasted and cubed the slices over the weekend and then stored them at room temperature until I was ready to make the stuffing.  Not sure how many cups that was, but it was 14 slices and, with the rest, fit into a 9" x 13" casserole dish.  I had to go up to 5 cups of broth because the larger amount of bread didn't seem to be soaking it up, and then I left it in the oven about an extra 20 minutes because it seemed a little soupy after the first 20 minutes.  (So maybe I didn't need the extra broth?)  I was bummed that it appeared to have burned when I took it out of the oven, but when I tasted it, it didn't seem burnt so much as caramelized.  Maybe the buttermilk in the bread had something to do with it?

Sauteed kale with radishes

I bought a bunch of radishes with tops last week on a whim - and then didn't do anything with them.  It occurred to me that Thanksgiving would be just as good an occasion as any to use them, but in what?  I'd only ever used them to spice up greens before.  Steve doesn't really like any greens other than kale and fresh spinach.  Since we've been eating a lot of the latter recently, I decided to go for the kale.  The idea was to have a healthy alternative to creamed spinach or greens cooked with salted meat.  This is by far the easiest side dish I made yesterday, although the baked sweet potatoes with streusel (below) were a close second. 

2 tbsp Earth Balance
1 bunch radishes (about 6-8 radishes), halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch kale, chopped and rinsed in several changes of water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper

In a large enough pot to hold all the fresh kale, heat Earth Balance over medium heat.  Add radishes and cook until softened, about 3-5 minutes.  Add garlic, stir and cook another 2 minutes.  Add kale, salt and pepper and stir well to coat with Earth Balance and mix with radishes and garlic.  Cover, lower heat to medium-low and cook until kale is wilted, about 10 minutes.

The nice thing about this dish is that, although very simple, it comes out tasting like you put more effort into it than you did.  Steve asked what the secret ingredient was and seemed surprised when I gave him the rundown.  People who like greens with vinegar can have their vinegar, but I've often found that salt (in moderation, of course) is just as easy a way to take the edge off of fresh greens.

Sweet potatoes with walnut streusel

For the most part I followed Tyler Florence's recipe.  However, since it was just us, I only put two large sweet potatoes in the oven.  For the streusel, I only used 1/4 cup of butter, brown sugar and flour and substituted chopped walnuts because Steve doesn't like pecans. 

I had some misgivings about doing this instead of a sweet potato souffle because you don't always know how good the sweet potatoes are until they come out of the oven.  Luckily - or maybe because they were locally grown? - the little piece I pinched off after taking them out of the oven was sweet enough not to need mixing with brown sugar or cinnamon. 

This brings us to dessert, which we did get to share with an evening guest:

Citrus pound cake with cranberry syrup

Just like the recipe says.  This is probably the first cake I've ever made without baking powder or soda, but by following the directions exactly, it came out.  I made the pound cake first because I wanted it to be room temperature when served, and the heat requirement was different than for everything else on the menu.  My friend Usa (who ran the NYC Marathon this year and finished in 3:50) came over in the evening for dessert and wine.  I made the cranberry syrup and served it up with the cake when she got here, and we talked about German restaurant experiences in the Columbia area (she's from Germany) and, of course, the marathon.  This rare visitation had me thinking that I really should plan better so that I can enjoy holidays like this to the fullest.  Steve's always good company, but it's still nice to have guests every once in a while.  Next year?

One last thing about the food: after Usa left and I started clearing away the dishes used to make the syrup, I discovered that the strained cranberries make a delicious homemade cranberry sauce!

So...having proven several times over that I can indeed make an edible turkey, I'm thinking that next year I'll scale back and make something that only calls for the turkey breast.  More on that next year.

Stay tuned to see what I do with all these leftovers through the weekend.  Hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving weekend and not being trampled underfoot by Black Friday shoppers!