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January 20, 2014

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Lentil and Chard Ragout, a delicious winter meal

I recently made a recipe from a relatively new (to me) vegan cookbook Crazy Sexy Kitchen. I bought this cookbook after attending a Whole Foods Culinary class featuring Chef Chad Sarno, one of the authors. It was a good way to use up some of the chard growing in the garden and a handful of our fresh herbs. I added peppers and okra from our garden to the recipe, to use them up before they went bad. I used the beluga (black) lentils called for in the recipe, the first time I’d ever had them. Beluga lentils are smaller and denser than other lentils. It was a very healthy and flavorful meal that my husband and I enjoyed all week.

The recipe started by sautéing shallot and garlic in oil.

Next, deglaze the pan with sherry and add beluga (black) lentils. I had peppers from the garden so I threw those in to add some spice. Garden fresh okra also went into the pan.

Add vegetable stock and simmer until the lentils are tender.

After the lentils were tender, add the chard, frozen peas, nutritional yeast, lemon zest, parsley, thyme and salt and cook on low for a few more minutes.

At the end, stir in a bit of butter (vegan if that’s what you prefer) and cracked pepper. Yum!

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Laura

Posted on

September 16, 2012

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Food & Drink

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Roasted vegetable and cabbage salad

We’ve been eating salad often the last few weeks. Mainly because we go out during the week and eat way too much and have to make up for it by having salad for dinner during the week. This week we decided to do grilled vegetables on top of a bed of roasted cabbage. I used sweet vegetables so that we could toss the salad with either a balsamic vinegar or some chipotle infused olive oil.

Ingredients:

Sweet potato
Sweet yellow onion
Carrots
Cauliflower
Poblano pepper
Cabbage
Thyme
Rosemary
Olive oil
Salt & Pepper

Steps:

Chop all vegetables. The sweet potatoes and the carrots take the longest to cook, so keep the slices thin. I like to slice the poblano thin. The cabbage should be sliced into thin ribbons. Toss the vegetables with a bit of olive oil and your spices. I used thyme and chopped rosemary from our garden, sea salt, and cracked black pepper.

Chopped vegetables

Oil a grill pan and cook the vegetable mixture over a low heat. This probably takes 20 – 30 minutes.

Grill pan

While the vegetables are cooking, prepare the cabbage. Toss the thinly sliced cabbage with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I usually just spread it out on a foil lined baking pan and use my oil sprayer to give the cabbage a light coat of oil.

Cabbage ready to be roasted

Roast the cabbage at 400 degrees. Stir it when the cabbage around the edges of the pan starts to brown. You want the cabbage to be uniformly cooked throughout. The total cooking time is about 15 minutes.

Cooked vegetables

Cooked cabbage

Serve the vegetables over a bed of cabbage. Each person can season their vegetables as desired. We tossed our vegetables with balsamic vinegars and olive oils on different nights: red apple balsamic, chipotle olive oil, and fig balsamic. The red apple balsamic and chipotle olive oil were both from Con Olio Oils and Vinegars here in Austin. The fig balsamic I made myself earlier this year.

Bounty from Con Olio

If you don’t top your dish with cheese like my husband does, then this makes a nice vegan dinner.

Posted by

Laura

Posted on

November 18, 2011

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baking, beer, bread, cooking, Food & Drink

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A dinner made with beer

Recently we were on a salad eating kick, and we always like to have a slice of nice bread with our salad. However, we were out of bread so I decided to whip up a batch of beer bread yet again. This time I tried a recipe from Farmgirl Fare. I made the Garlic Herb version with a bottle of Avery White Rascal.

I skipped the glaze. It turned out pretty well, especially toasted with some butter.

Because it’s starting to feel like fall, I settled on making french onion soup for dinner this week. I wanted to make a vegetarian recipe, so I modified this recipe from the Craftzine blog. My modifications were:

Cooking the onions with a small amount of vegetable broth rather than a slew of butter
Using a bottle of Maredsous along with the vegetable broth to make the stock, instead of sherry. I used 4 cups of vegetable broth, one bottle of beer and probably about one extra cup of water to make sure we would have enough broth to go with all of the onion
I added dried thyme to the broth for some extra flavor

So many onions:

After simmering with the beer vegetable broth:

I then ladled the onion soup into a soup crock, topped it with a slice of the beer bread mentioned earlier, and covered it with cheese. After baking in the oven for a few minutes and then using the broiler to finish the top, it was ready to eat!

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Laura

Posted on

October 16, 2011

Posted under

cooking, Food & Drink

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Spaghetti squash, my new favorite squash

At some point I realized that Alamo Drafthouse, the awesomest of movie theaters, included a dish on their menu called “spaghetti squash and pomodoro sauce”. Since the dish was both vegetarian and featured a new to me squash I had to try it. I think I’ve now eaten it on 3 out of my last 4 Alamo trips because it is delicious. It’s basically squash topped with mushrooms, sauce and parmesan.

Well this week I decided I wanted to make my own spaghetti squash dish, so I did. I got a giant squash at the grocery store that fed two of us for two nights. I sliced it open and cleaned it out, kind of like a pumpkin. It then had to go into two separate baking dishes – I baked it for about 50 minutes, sliced side down, with a bit of water in the bottom of the pan.

While the squash baked, I assembled my ingredients, sauce, mushrooms, onion, and a red pepper. If you’ve never tried Newman’s Own “Sockarooni” sauce, I highly recommend it. It has a slight fresh garden and spicy flavor and is just plain good. Newman’s Own also donates their profits to charity so that makes me happy.

I sautéed each vegetable separately in a touch of olive oil, being careful not to over cook them.

After all of that, the squash was about done. I could tell because when I scraped the inside with a fork, the squash easily pulled apart into spaghetti looking strands.

I served a quarter of the squash topped with the mushrooms, onion, red pepper, sauce and cheese. It was quite delicious. I really like the slightly crunch texture of the squash strands.

Posted by

Laura

Posted on

August 28, 2011

Posted under

cooking, Food & Drink

It’s hatch green chile time!

Here in Austin, the grocery stores get excited each year at this time for hatch green chiles to arrive from Hatch, New Mexico. I have no idea if this is a thing in other parts of the country or not. The grocery stores offer both fresh and roasted hatch chiles and a variety of other hatch flavored foods. Chuy’s even makes a special menu that we always go check out.

For dinner this week, I decided I wanted to make something with hatch chiles for the first time in my 9 years in Austin. I decided on a play off of chicken salad that uses tofu instead. I combined extra firm tofu, patted dry, with diced red onion, roasted hatch chiles, sunflower seeds, and mayo. We ate the tofu salad as an open faced sandwich on a slice of sourdough bread topped with a slice of heirloom tomato. Man, did they turn out spicy! I used 6 roasted chiles, 3 of them mild and 3 hot. On the side, I made roasted cauliflower tossed with olive oil and rosemary from our garden. It’s really the only thing left alive.

I decided that while the 110 degree air outside probably could roast the cauliflower and chiles, it most likely would take too long. Instead, I fired up the grill and roasted them myself.

Cauliflower and chiles, ready to roast:

After roasting:

I then had to remove the skins from the chiles because they are quite crisp. Luckily my husband mentioned that because I was ready to leave them on.

Tofu, onion (at the bottom) and the chiles ready to go:

Mixed with mayo and sunflower seeds:

Served open-faced with a slice of heirloom tomato:

All in all, a quite tasty sandwich. Sometimes I feel that food made with hatch green chiles isn’t all that exciting. However, I definitely enjoyed this sandwich, especially after my mouth stopped burning.

Posted by

Laura

Posted on

April 5, 2011

Posted under

cooking, Food & Drink

Making Stir Fry

Like most people, my husband and I like stir fry. The problem is that every time we try to make it at home, it’s bland at best despite following tasty sounding recipes.

Every so often we forget that we’re bad at making stir fry and give it another go. This time, I was persuaded to try yet again by two things. This blog post from Yard Farm, ATX about how to roast cabbage by tossing it in olive oil with some salt and pepper. It suggests using the roasted cabbage as a noodle substitute and I do love some cabbage. Then, the most recent Vegetarian Times magazine had a section on Asian dishes, including one for Stir Fried Rice Noodles. The recipe calls for rice noodles, asparagus, sugar peas, eggs, green onion and a sauce. It looked amazing.

Luckily for us, it turned out delicious this time, despite the changes I made to the recipe.

The recipe in Vegetarian Times: