Minestrone

Before I go into tonight's dinner, I should go back about a month in time and provide an accounting of my fast.  In a nutshell, I broke down on day 3.  It was just too hard, even with a 3-day weekend, to do stuff around the house on a juice-only diet after five days of eating fruits and vegetables only.  I just felt too deprived, so on days 3 and 4 of the juice fast, I broke the fast in the evening by eating cashews, chips and salsa and the like, and on day 5 I finished up whatever premade juice was on hand and then called it quits.  I wouldn't categorically say that it was a bad idea or that I wouldn't try something like it again.  However, I will say that it probably would have been more prudent to start out small - say, with a 3-day juice fast with no pre- or post-fast dietary restrictions - and then worked my way up to the 15-day deal over time.

One cool thing about the reboot is that I had a reason to save a bunch of veggie juice pulp and make my own veggie broth.  The latest batch was made with pulp from butternut squash and a couple of green veggies I could no longer identify after a month of them being pulped and stored in the freezer, and it saved me having to heat water for veggie base.

So...here's one of the many things I've eaten over the past month!  My main objective here was to hurry up and use the broth I made a few days ago, but it worked out especially well with today's cooler weather and clouds.

Minestrone:
1 lb. dried red kidney beans, soaked
5 cups veggie broth plus 3 cups water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 zucchini, quartered lengthwise and sliced 1/4" thick
1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves garlic
1 can organic fire-roasted chopped tomatoes with their juice
1 cup frozen green beans, thawed
1/2 cup orzo pasta
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp ground sage
50 leaves fresh oregano, whole

Quick soak: in a 2-quart pot, cover dry beans in water by one inch.  Bring to a boil, boil one minute, then remove from heat, cover and soak one hour.

In a 6-8 quart pot, bring broth and water to a boil, add kidney beans and simmer until they're nearly done, stirring occasionally (lest the beans start sticking to the bottom of the pot), about 30-45 minutes. 

In a separate saucepan, heat olive oil over medium heat.  Add zucchini, onion and garlic, stir well and saute until softened, about 3-5 minutes.  Add mixture to kidney beans and broth along with tomatoes, green beans, salt, pepper, oregano and sage.  Cook until green beans have heated through, about another 5 minutes.  Add orzo, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally (to keep pasta from sticking to the bottom), until soup is bubbling.
***
I've actually made this a bunch of times over the years - usually with canned kidney beans and maybe also some chickpeas - and it never gets old.  Normally I don't like to dredge the pot (as Steve does) when I serve myself a bowl of soup, but I do with soups containing pasta because the pasta will keep plumping up in the fridge and it can be annoying to run out of broth because the pasta has absorbed it all and then have to add water and salt to the leftovers to restore the soup consistency.  (Run-on?  Oh, well.)  Speaking of which...this coming weekend I'm off, and I now have leftovers to get me through one more workday!

Have a good weekend, and maybe I'll see a few of you at the Moe's Burrito Dash 5K on Saturday!

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, Ready in 24 Hours

This photo was taken a few bites in...I was just that impatient!

I'm getting to where my freezer and cupboard are filled to capacity without the same space shortage issue in the fridge.  And since a recent warm spell has gone away and we're back to more normal, windy weather for early March, this week seemed like as good as any for making a big pot of soup. 

Until now, the only other things I'd ever made that took more than one day were the broth for the post-Thanksgiving turkey noodle soup and the North African-inspired soup I made in the crock pot a week later.  Lately, one of the items that's been taking up a ridiculous amount of cupboard space is this huge, coffee can-sized container of dried soybeans that I got from my co-worker with a vegetarian daughter (the same one who passed along the big bag of TVP that I used to make the shepherd's pie).  Having never eaten the dried kind before, I accepted it without really knowing what I was getting.  Would I would like them enough to make them again, or would they end up in the compost bin without ever being soaked and cooked?  Over the weekend I decided it was time to find out one way or another and dispense with these and some other canned and dried beans. 

And here's where the plot thickens.  You see, I neglected to look up cooking times for soaked soy beans and assumed that they would cook in an hour or so, like other dried beans that have been soaked overnight.  Wrong.

I threw the following ingredients (except the black beans and green beans) into a pot around 6:00 last night and figured it wouldn't take more than an hour for the soy beans to cook through:

Seven Bean Soup:
2 tbsp olive oil
3-4 carrots, peeled, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 cup frozen green beans, thawed
1 cup frozen lima beans, thawed
5 cups vegetable broth
1 cup dry soybeans, soaked and drained
1 cup yellow split peas (?)
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-oz can of diced tomatoes
2 tsp dried Italian herbs
salt and pepper to taste

As the evening wore on, I realized how very wrong it was to expect this to cook through in the same length of time as a package of HamBeens 15 Bean Soup.  When I went to bed a little after 9:00 (one thing about being an early morning runner is that you have a small child's bedtime), the soybeans were still crunchy!  So I took Steve's advice and turned the heat all the way down and let it cook through the night.

When I got up this morning...still crunchy!  G&^^$##*%!  So I turned the heat up a notch and headed out for my run.  Upon my return, they were...better, but they still had a ways to go.  So, I turned the heat back down to 1 and left for work a little after 7.  Thankfully, Steve works at home, so I didn't have to worry about the house burning down while I was away.  I ended up simmering it over low heat until about 5:30 tonight.  By that time, most of the soy beans were tender, but a few were still a little firm to the bite. 

Oh, well.  Since I ended up cooking it crock-pot style on the stove, the flavors had plenty of time to come together.  I added an 8-ounce can of tomato sauce near the end, which also gave it a little something something.  The soup was actually really good!  As Steve said, it was worth the wait. 

Now I know to plan ahead anytime I want to make more of these.  I'm thinking these have the potential to make a yummy cassoulet or slow cooker baked beans.  Stay tuned...