Stuff we’ve eaten lately.

While Red and I continue to nibble away on the vat of buffalo tofu we made over the weekend, here are some other things we’ve eaten over the last week or so:


This here’s a nice minestrone. I have a recipe I printed from some website a few years ago and veganized, but you don’t really need one. I like to think of minestrone as “Italian leftover soup,” because that’s basically what it is. Got some sad veggies languishing in that Crisper drawer? Chop ‘em up and throw ‘em in a pot with a can of beans, a can of tomatoes, a few cups of broth, a handful of small pasta, and a few shakes of Italian seasoning. When the pasta’s ready, chow down. Because my inner child demanded to be indulged, we used ABC pasta this time. I did not torment Red by insisting that we play Scrabble with our soup noodles.


I made a double batch of seitan last week. Some went into Appetite for Reduction’s Portobello Peppersteak Stew, which is delicious but not at all photogenic, so I didn’t bother with a picture. (It is incredible though, so you should make it.) Red sliced up the rest and we made barbecue seitan! This is one of his favorites. I sautéed the seitan for a few minutes in our biggest cast-iron skillet, then poured a bottle of Organicville Tangy BBQ Sauce over it and let it simmer until we got too hungry and had to eat it. Because nothing accompanies barbecue like cornbread, I made Cornbread Biscuits from Vegan Brunch. They were possibly even easier than regular cornbread, and very tasty. Them’s frozen green beans up there, if you’re keeping track.


This is Quinoa, White Bean, and Kale Stew from Appetite for Reduction. Isn’t it pretty? I love all the colors. It is a total color-texture extravaganza. This stew has damn near everything in it—kale, potatoes, carrots, quinoa, beans, parsnips, leeks, a bunch of spices, and on and on—but it comes together very quickly. I know I mentioned parsnips and they are kind of creepy to some people, looking like albino carrots like they do, but believe me, you won’t even notice them. They blend right in with the potatoes and you can’t tell the difference. I have examined spoonfuls of this stew, looking for something identifiably parsnip, and I haven’t found it yet. You should also know that the quinoa soaks up the broth like crazy, so after a night in the fridge, your stew becomes less stewish and more like a delicious amalgamation of veggies and grains that you need to eat with a spoon. It’s doesn’t bother me at all, but if you want to preserve your solid-to-liquid ratio, you might be SOL unless you eat the entire vat at once.


Last night, we made Pasta con Broccoli, also courtesy of AFR. It’s pretty obvious what this is, right? We cheaped out and used frozen broccoli, so it was extra-quick. Red was a little skeptical of a pasta dish that didn’t have an accompanying sauce, but he was pleasantly surprised. I was surprised by how filling it was—I didn’t expect that plain old noodles and broccoli would leave me satisfied for more than an hour or two. It is a garlicky delight that you could easily change up with whatever veggies in your fridge or freezer crave the loving embrace of pasta.

So there you have it. We’ve noticed that although we’ve loved everything from AFR so far, we seem to always end up with one less serving than Isa suggests. This isn’t really a problem for us—that pasta dish was supposed to make four servings at 300 calories each, so even if Red and I each snarfed down half the pan, that still would have been only 600 calories apiece for dinner—but maybe you care more about calories than we do. Anyway, all the AFR recipes have been so easy and tasty, three servings instead of four (or seven instead of eight) is totally justifiable.

Noms of late.

Here’s a random food post for you long-suffering readers. Still grooving on Appetite for Reduction, so that’s what we’ve been eating lately:


This is Ginger Bok Choy & Soba with some cubed tofu. It was really good, except for the part where soba noodles cost four times as much as regular noodles. Eff that, I say. I buy my pasta at Costco, even the whole-wheat stuff. Seriously though, the ginger adds a nice zip to this dish and the noodles are very comforting.


Arabian Lentil & Rice Soup may be my favorite soup yet from this book. Red compared it to chicken noodle, and it does have that homey, snow-day appeal without, you know, the carcass. We added extra carrots, because carrots rock. The rice soaks up the liquid after it sits awhile, but I just added a little extra water when I packed the leftovers for lunch and everything was aces.

We desperately need bowls that aren’t stark white.

Applesauce Soup! Okay, not really, but that’s what I’m calling it. This is Butternut-Apple Soup, and it is like Thanksgiving in a bowl. We had to hack this one a bit, as our hippie grocery was out of butternut squash. We bought three small acorn squashes instead, reasoning that it was a pretty fair substitution. The recipe calls for dicing the squash and adding it to the pot, but if you’ve ever tried to peel an acorn squash, you’ll know why I decided to roast them and then scoop the cooked flesh out instead. It worked like awesome. It gets pureed anyway, so where’s the harm? It tastes pretty good, too—a little sweet for me, but it all balances out. This is the kind of thing I would serve to guests at a fancy holiday party, with a little sprig of fresh rosemary on top. Like the lentil-rice soup, it thickens in the fridge, but that just means you’ll spill a little less.

And here, my darlings, is what I made last night:


This gorgeous specimen is Cauliflower Pesto Soup, and yes, I chiffonaded that basil and artfully arranged that pine nut just for the photo. One of my coworkers sent me this recipe that appeared in the Washington Post, which is basically the exact same thing. The fine print says that it’s adapted from the Appetite for Reduction recipe, but the only change I can see is the amount of pine nuts, and those are optional anyway. Oh, and a little extra olive oil, which the soup totally does not need. So, I wouldn’t really call that adapted, more like ripped off. Anyway, I made it Isa’s way because I don’t suck. And the soup is divine. So easy and so good for you, but luscious with basil and garlic. My basil lives at my in-laws’ house because they get all the sunlight that we don’t, and the basil was pretty pathetic when it lived here. Under my mom-in-law’s care, it’s perked right up. I love fresh basil.

I ate my soup with a side of this:



Sad puppy face is because Red is away for work this week. Lucy and I are both despondently lounging in front of the TV, nuzzling each other for comfort. God, I’m so dramatic. He’ll be back late Friday. Until then, the house will be quiet and the fridge will runneth over as I’ll have no one to help me eat everything.

Speaking of Lucy, she is still on activity restriction, but she had her stitches out over the weekend. The vet thinks she may have injured a tendon as she seems unable to retract one of her toes. This doesn’t hurt her and doesn’t affect how she moves; it just means that one of her toes sort of magically grew a couple centimeters. Leave it to Lucy, y’all.

Soup to the second power.

Because I was a good little Burnout all year, Santa brought me Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s newest book, Appetite for Reduction! I tested a few recipes before it was published, so I was excited to try the rest of them. Since it’s been cold and we’ve been busy, Red and I decided to start with soup.

First up was Lotsa Veggies Lentil Soup, which is just what it sounds like. I like cooking with green lentils, because I usually end up using red ones and the green ones are a nice change. Red lentils are awesome and I love them, but they turn into yellow mush when you cook them. Green lentils retain their recognizable lentil-ness. Anyway, this is an easy, tasty lentil soup with extra veggies. Finally, a use for the CSA zucchini and summer squash that I blanched and froze back in July, when it seemed that the tide of squashy goodness would never end! The recipe called for 6 oz. of tomato sauce, but the store only had 8-oz. cans, and what do you do with an extra 2 oz. of tomato sauce? I didn’t want to figure it out, so I plopped all 8 oz. in there and it was all good.

Why the hell is there a date stamp on my photo? Shit, guess I need to play with the new camera more.

The best part of this soup wasn’t the soup, though. It was that we ate it while watching Troll 2, which is pretty much the height of awesomeness. There’s a hilarious vegetarian subtext in there as well, and I shit you not when I tell you that the young hero is saved by the deus ex machina of a baloney sandwich.



Anyway, now that we’ve established that my husband and I are film connoisseurs, I ask you: What’s better than soup? A second pot of soup! Red was in the mood for a corn chowder of some sort, so I made Summer Lovin’ Curried Corn & Veggie Chowder. The rest of that frozen squash and zucchini went in here, along with frozen bagged corn (so not seasonal). It took a little longer than usual because I did all the chopping myself, but there was a Buffy marathon on, so I didn’t mind. This soup was delicious, but I bet it’s even better in the summer with fresh corn. It would probably be yummy chilled, with a side of lightly steamed veggies or a salad. I love anything curried, and this had a bold curry flavor that wasn’t too strong. Curry n00bs would probably love it.

It is the most gorgeous sunny yellow. Just looking at it makes me happy.

So far, I’m loving this cookbook. I think I usually stick to a very healthy diet, but during this past month, I’ve eaten more takeout and cookies than I usually do. It feels good to get back on a regular schedule and prepare my own food from scratch, and I think Appetite for Reduction will be a great resource for a healthy 2011.

Soup’s on.

Red and I both love soup. I’ve eaten minestrone for more days in a row than I can count, and I have fond (pre-vegan) memories of my friend Jess’ grilled-cheese-and-tomato-soup lunches. When I’m hungry and tired, Amy’s canned soups hit the spot without feeling or tasting like canned soup. When I lived alone (rather, with my sister, but she rarely ate anything I made), I underestimated the quantity of Veganomicon’s Tomato-Rice Soup with Roasted Garlic and Navy Beans and ended up eating it twice a day for a week or more. It was delicious, but I was definitely tomato-ed out afterwards. It’s nice to make soup for two, is what I’m saying.

Red is a great person to make soup with. Last winter, he found a crock-pot recipe for spicy black bean soup. It was easy and good, but a little too spicy even for him. There was that one time he forgot to add the broth to the minestrone, but we’ll let that be. This weekend, with fall clearly upon us, he agreed that we should indulge in some seriously heavy soup action.

First order of business: 30-Minute Vegan’s African Sweet Potato Soup. I was a little nervous of a soup that involved peanut butter, but the cookbook hadn’t steered us wrong yet, and it was only a quarter-cup, so what the hell. Peanut butter in soup? Be my guest. I souped while Red studied (or maybe he was reading There I Fixed It), and the result was a silky, tangy-sweet creation that was half hearty vegetable soup, half creamy peanut-ginger bisque. It sounds weird on paper, I know, but it was delicious. And all the credit goes to my immersion blender.

Not where you thought I was going with that, huh? But, all exaggeration aside, the immersion blender is a miracle of engineering. Gone are the days of ladling hot soup into a blender and praying the lid doesn’t explode off in a steaming volcano of fail. Instead of puréeing and scraping the peanut butter-spice-lime juice mixture out of a blender—our blender weighs about 90 pounds, did I mention that?—all I had to do was dump everything into a mixing bowl and go to town with the immersion blender. It does a number on hummus, too. Then, it helped me purée half the sweet potato soup to get that creamy consistency without the blender-pitcher-spatula drama. It is a handy little gadget and I love it. Thanks to my dad-in-law for listening when he asked what I wanted for Christmas.

Moral of the story: African Sweet Potato Soup is definitely a keeper. And so is my stick blender (’scuse me, fancypants, immersion blender). More soup goodness to come later this week!

Sweet potato photo ripped from Wikipedia.