Creamy Butternut Squash Curried Soup

The Dilemma: We received a big, beautiful butternut squash in the organics vegetable box we ordered this week. My husband does not like squash but we have one so it must be eaten as organic food is pricey.

The Solution: Blend it and add it to a spicy soup. My husband had seconds and my son ate it all so it must have been good.

Ingredients:
1/2 a butternut squash (about 2 cups blended)
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 yellow pepper, chopped
1 stalk of celery, chopped (I used two home grown celery stalks because they are smaller)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp turmeric
1 can coconut milk
2 cups water
small handful of sunflower seed
1/4 cup quinoa
2 tsp red curry paste
pinch of black pepper
salt to taste
1 green onion chopped
1 tomato chopped

What to do:
1. Cut the butternut squash into large pieces, (removing the seeds and goop) arrange on a large plate and microwave on high until cooked. This took my microwave about 10 minutes. When cool enough to handle, remove the skin and blend the squash with a bit of water until smooth.
2. In a large pot on medium heat, add olive oil, pepper and celery and cook for 2 minutes.
3. Add garlic and cook for 1 more minute.
4. Add squash, coconut milk, water, ground ginger, turmeric, sun flower seeds, quinoa. Bring to boil at higher heat then bring to low heat and simmer until the quinoa is cooked (no longer has white center).
5. This is where I remove my son's portion as he does not like spice.
6. Mix in 2 tsp red curry paste, salt and black pepper to taste. Top with fresh tomato and green onions.

Makes about 3 servings. 

Sinfully Simple Vegan Chocolate Pudding

Every once in a while I need to eat some awesome dessert. This recipe is incredibly easy and does not need a lot of ingredients. As a basic recipe, you can customize it a lot. Cocoa is good for you and the soy milk has protein and B12 if justification is needed. Needless to say, my son likes this recipe a lot.

What you need:

• 3 tbsp cornstarch
• 3 tbsp cocoa
• 3 tbsp of sugar
• 2 cups of soymilk
• Optional: Coconut whipped, chocolate shavings, mini Oreos

What to do:

Mix first three ingredients together in a pot. Add about a half a cup of the soymilk and mix well, Add the rest of the milk stirring well to combine. Heat on 4 (medium-low) continuing to mix with a whisk until the pudding thickens. Pour into bowls and put them in the fridge to cool for about an hour. Once cool, top with the chipped cream, chocolate shavings and Oreos.

Makes 3-4 servings.  

Quinoa and Lentil Vegetable Chowder

It was early in the week and we had not had time to do a proper grocery. Fortunately there are vegetables in the house (there almost always is) and a few growing outside. We always have garlic and vegetable bouillon cubes and that is all you need for a soup base. Here is what we created from what we could find. Not the prettiest dish but it tasted good and was filling.

Ingredients:

• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• vegetable bullion cube
• celery, 4 stalks if home grown, 1-2 stalks if from the store (we also chopped up the leaves and added them. 
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 cup of cauliflower,separated into florets
• 1 cup of red lentils (other lentils work fine but take more time to cook)
• 1/4 cup quinoa
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp salt

What to do:

1. Add the 4 cloves of garlic to a large sauce pan with the olive oil. Saute on medium until the garlic is fragrant and beginning to brown slightly. Don't let the garlic brown too much or it will taste burnt. 
2. Once the garlic is cooked, add about 1/2 a cup of water to stop the garlic from frying further. Stir in the bullion cube so that there are no large clumps. Add about 5 cups of waer and set to high heat. 
3. Add the rest of the ingredients and boil until the vegetables, lentils and quinoa are cooked. Remove bay leaf and enjoy :)

Stu (the Impalers) Magnificent BBQ Tofu Kabobs

I post a lot of recipes in this blog which would lead one to believe that I do all the cooking in the house. Fortunately for my sanity, this is not the case. My husband has his own set of recipes and makes dinner rather regularly. This is one of his concoctions and it is quite good. 

Ingredients:

• half a sweet onion, chopped into large pieces
• cherry tomatoes
• pepper, chopped in large pieces
• zucchini, cut into 1 cm thick slices
• a package of firm tofu, cut into cubes about a square inch
• BBQ sauce
• lemon pepper seasoning
• bamboo skewers

What to do

1. Soak 6-8 skewers in water while you are chopping up the veggies and tofu. 

2. Put zucchini in a bowel and sprinkle on some lemon pepper seasoning. Mix until evenly dispersed.

3. Impale the veggies with the skewers by piercing them with the sharpened end. Split up the veggies more or less evenly among each skewer. You can choose to arrange the veggies in a pattern or not, what ever works for you. 

4. Using a kitchen brush, spread the BBQ sauce over all the veggies and tofu except for the zucchini. 

5. Use an aerosol oil to coat a clean grill of the BBQ. Turn the BBQ on to low-medium heat. Place skewers on the grill after it has heated up a few minutes. Flip the skewers every 3-5 minutes until cooked to your liking.  Use BBQ tongs for the flipping. Add more BBQ sauce to exposed side periodically. 

6. Eat!

Completely Unauthentic But Pretty Good Tasting Dahl

This recipe has evolved over time from something completely different. It was originally a butter-less, chicken-less, butter chicken recipe but soy chicken is crazy expensive and lentils are just amazing. They are packed full of fiber, protein and iron and my son will actually eat them so they are perfect.

Ingredients:
1 cup green lentils
1/2 a large sweet onion (or a whole small one), chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 green pepper, chopped
1 can of tomato soup
3/4 cup soymilk
2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp ground ginger
olive oil
paprika
small handful of cherry tomatoes quartered

What to do:
1. Cook lentils according to package directions.
2. In a frying pan or wok over medium heat, fry onion for about a minute then add garlic and fry both for another minute. Add green pepper and fry until onions turn translucent.
3. Stir in the can of tomato soup, then stir in the soy milk.
4. Add all the spices and mix well. Strain the lentils once they are cooked and mix those in too.
5. Top with tomatoes, a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of paprika. Serve with naan or rice.

Pizza Quesadillas

We did not start off intending to make quesadillas again so soon. The plan for tonight was pizza. We had dough left over from another meal that we intended to use but when I went to roll it out is smelled like booze. I guess we let the yeast act on it a little too long. On to plan B.

There were wraps so opted for pizza a slightly different way. I was not confident the wrap would provide enough support for the toppings as a single layer and quesadillas are faster to cook so that became the new plan. It worked well, my 4 year old liked them though we used a different vegetarian luncheon "meat" due to his hatred for anything spicy.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 wraps
• pepper chopped
• tomato copped
• pizza sauce
• Daiya cheese
• Yves vegetarian pepperoni

What to do:

1. Lay out the wraps. Spread a thin layer of pizza sauce over half of each one. 
2. Add a layer of daiya over the pizza sauce followed by the pepperoni, pepper, tomato and more daiya. 
3. Fold the clear half of the wrap over. Fry without oil on a clean frying pan on medium heat until the cheese melts and that side browns. Flip and fry the other side. Chop in half and enjoy. 

Quick Quesadillas

We had to eat, we had soccer coming up fast, we couldn't waste anytime so we throw together some quesadillas. I was introduced to quesadillas in undergrad. They are customizable so I could order the ingredients I wanted, watch them make it, and be certain there was nothing lurking within that I was allergic to. This was an amazing discovery for me because posting ingredients to prepared cafeteria food was not common back then and I would frequently have allergic reactions to foods that seemed allergen free.

We left university a long time ago now but have continued making quesadillas at home. This is a simple base recipe that can be added too. You could consider adding chopped snap peas, sweet onions, banana peppers, tomatoes, etc. The highly processed bologna could be replaced with seasoned tofu, beans or quinoa.

Ingredients for 1 quesadilla:

• 1 wrap
• daiya cheddar or mozzarella shreds
• 2-3 slices of Yves bologna
• 1/2 a pepper chopped
• salsa for dipping

What to do:

1. Lay wrap flat on a plate and sprinkle daiya over one side.
2. Lay the bologna over the cheese. 
3. Add pepper and any other toppings you like them top this layer with more daiya cheese. 
4. Fold the wrap in half over the toppings. 
5. Bring a clean, dry frying pan to low-medium heat. Add the quesadilla, cooking until the side browns slightly and cheese on that side melts then flip to cook the other side. 
6. Transfer to plate, cut in half and serve with salsa for dipping. 

Easy But Crazy Healthy Vegetable Quinoa Soup

If you have tomatoes, an onion, some sun dried tomatoes and other vegetables (almost any others really), you can make soup! Here is one such soup.

Ingredients:

• 3 pieces of sun dried tomato . 
• 2 large tomatoes- cut into large peices
• 1/2 a sweet onion- cut into large peices
• 1/2 cup quinoa
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 yellow pepper, chopped
• 2 ribs of celery, chopped
• 1/2 cup of savoy cabbage, chopped
• 1 leaf of purple kale, chopped 
• 1/4 cup sunflower seeds
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 2 cups of water

What to do:

1. Put the sun dried tomatoes in a high speed blender with a bit of water and blend for about a minute. Leave them to soak for 5-10 minutes to soften the tomatoes then blend again until there are no large pieces. 
2. Add the fresh tomatoes and onion to the blender. Blend until smooth and pour into a large pot. 
3. Bring the tomato mixture to a boil on medium high then lower to medium. The soup base should turn from pink to red. 
4. Add the rest of the ingredients, boil until the vegetables are cooked. Add more water if needed to maintain a desirable soupiness. 

Bite into Bitters: Simple Dandelion Salad

I love dandelion greens but this has not always been the case. They are bitter, there is no way around that. We are not use to eating bitters anymore because the taste has been more or less breed out of the other vegetables we eat over a long long time. It's too bad because they are good for the digestive system. The first time I bought them I boiled them and was not able to eat them at all. This was 11 years ago and now I buy them when ever they look healthy in the grocery store. I had to learn to love bitters slowly. I was motivated after learning about how amazing bitters are for your health from an expert in herbal medicine.  I started consuming moderately bitter greens like escarole. I would eat it until I stopped noticing the bitter tastes as much and started to notice the sweet notes then I'd move on to another more bitter green after a few weeks.

The dandelion greens looked good today so I nabbed some for a simple, antioxidant rich salad. To my surprise my husband requested some and actually ate the whole bowl full. He did not claim it was enjoyable.

Ingredients:

• dandelion greens, washed well and chopped 
• 1 tbsp of hemp hearts
• 1-2 tbsp of slivered almonds
• small handful of raw cashews
• favorite dressing. Lemon with olive oil and herbs works well with the bitters. 

Directions:

• Mix everything together. 
• Consume  :)

This is easy enough that I am going to try to bring it as a lunch everyday for work to replace the nothing I currently eat for lunch. I buy these instead of wild sourcing because I live in the city and I am concerned with chemicals but if you had a good source you could collect your own :)

Simple Salad with Maple Balsamic Tofu

I don't eat a lot of salad. It was the first thing I got sick of when I went vegan, but I have been craving salads more often lately so I am bringing them back into the rotation. There is nothing too fancy about this particular salad, just veggies, seeds and a dressing I put together last week with ingredients we had on hand. Thus the accompanying tofu had to be a little special. I didn't include the dressing recipe here because I didn't measure anything exactly and it was a week ago so my memory is foggy. I will have a future post on how to throw together salad dressings.







Ingredients:

Salad 
-lettuce
-tomato
-pepper
-celery
-cucumber
-sunflower and hemp seeds

Maple Balsamic Tofu
-1 tbsp olive oil
-420 g (one package) firm tofu cut into 6 slices
-2 tbsp maple syrup
-1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
-salt and pepper
-salad dressing of choice (Greek works well)

Directions:
1. Chop salad veggies and combine in a bowl. Quantity is not important with salad veggies, chop as much as you like. Sprinkle sunflower and hemp seeds over top and set aside.
2. Add olive oil to a pan and heat on medium. Before the pan gets too hot, arrange the tofu slices on the pan so there is no space between then (pictured above).
3, When the oil starts to bubble pour the maple syrup and balsamic vinegar over the tofu. Keep a lid to the pan handy during the pour in case there is splatter when the syrup and vinegar mix with the hot oil.
4. Cover the pan and left the tofu cook until the bottom begins to brown. Then flip to brown the other side. The maple syrup should caramelize a little. When both sides have browned a bit, add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Add salad and tofu to a plate. Add favorite dressing to the salad and enjoy.