CSA Weeks 18, 19, and 20: Potatoes, sweet and non.

Guess what, darlings? I just realized that I have three weeks of CSA photos for you, and I’m gonna try to get it all done right now! Fun, yeah? No promises that I can remember what we did with every random carrot, but let’s do this thing. Hold onto your squash!

First off, a programming note: Astute readers will notice that this post covers Weeks 18 through 20, while the previous one covered Weeks 15 and 16. Whither Week 17? Damned if I know. Going back through my calendar, it looks like what I called Week 16 is really Week 17, which means I lost a week in there somewhere. Through the looking glass, y’all. Who wants their money back?


We had an insanely long day of outdoor apple butter-making that started before the sun had fully come up, so I hustled to the farmer’s market and back without stopping at any of the other vendors. Here we have sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, lacinato kale, and collard greens.

We freaking love kale, and collards are pretty tasty themselves. We combined them for Vegan Soul Kitchen’s Citrus Collards with Raisins Redux, which we tried for the first time back in July and have wanted to make again since it started getting autumnal up in here. Like before, I scorned the raisins in favor of cranberries. The kale was a welcome addition.

Pretty sure we just roasted up those giant sweet potatoes with some olive oil and a drizzle of maple syrup. Best way to do it. I think in my last post I mentioned some caulipots, too, yeah? Must be where the regular potatoes went. Caulipots are great because you don’t even notice the cauliflower. Insofar as there’s a recipe for them, I use Isa’s from Appetite for Reduction—which reminds me, I need to reclaim that from a friend I lent it to in August. Caulipots are delicious on their own, but Red was feeling experimental and decided we should try a vegan gravy packet in advance of Thanksgiving (we’ll be traveling to my sister’s in North Carolina, so we’re planning ahead). It was fine. Nothing exceptional, but it looked very homey on top of the caulipots.


CSA-adjacent but still delicious is this Spaghetti Pie with Arrabbiata Sauce (with Daiya on top) from American Vegan Kitchen. It is like lasagna without the drama. Actually, there was a little drama, because it turned out to be really hard to dish out spaghetti noodles using a spatula while trying to maintain the integrity of the casserole. It worked much better when the pie had spent the night in the fridge and I sliced it for lunches, but next time I think we’ll make it with penne or rotini or another, more scoopable pasta. Regardless of logistical difficulties, it’s super-tasty and very satisfying. We had too much sauce, which is a great problem to have, so we just boiled up some more pasta and were good to go!


Here’s Week 19:


That broccoli hung out until this past week (Week 20), but no worries—it has a happy ending. I made the prettiest miso soup with the bok choy:


It was good, Red was weirded out because I added some kelp granules to the broth, which it made it grainy. My bad, babe.

Here’s that butternut squash soup I couldn’t shut up about last week. It’s got squash, carrots, some of that ancient-yet-still-crisp cauliflower, and probably some onion and garlic. I am totally blanking on where the recipe came from. If I can solve the mystery, maybe I’ll update the post. Maybe I won’t. Anyway, it’s pretty basic, but good and very comforting as the nights get colder. As I was cooking, we realized we didn’t have any nice crusty bread to go with it. Red ran out to the crappy grocery store down the street (sorry, but it’s true), and the only vegan breadstuff was their generic dinner rolls. First-world problem, ahoy! Trust us, we survived.


Remember when I raved about Tami’s seitan cutlets? That was nine days ago, you guys. Anyway, the seitan recipe basically makes double what you need for any of the recipes in American Vegan Kitchen. Half became the Salisbury Seitan of my last update, and the rest met its destiny as Mexicali Seitan in some fabulous burritos:


When Red took a bite, he said, “Holy shit, this tastes like a grilled-steak taco.” I don’t speak the language of omnis very fluently anymore (what is this “bacon” your people rhapsodize about so obsessively?), but I could tell he was pleased that all the tastes of his former meat-eating life were not forever lost to him. They were goddamn amazing burritos.

Week 20, ready for its close-up:


More potatoes and sweet potatoes! Whatever will we do?

Here’s some excellent potato-and-corn chowder, veganized from a random Internet recipe:


There’s that broccoli, in addition to some carrots, corn and potatoes (obviously). We had bought oyster mushrooms because Red wisely thought they’d be a good addition. Unfortunately, I forgot to add them. Fortunately, we still had miso soup in the fridge, and oyster mushrooms seemed like they’d be a good fit. As you see, they were:


We’d also bought a bunch of portabella strips, some of which ended up in here:


That is Brewpub Tater-Tot Pie from American Vegan Kitchen, and it is why Tami is going to take over the world someday. Let me say it again.

TATER. TOT. PIE.

Regardless of your feelings on Napoleon Dynamite (I am apathetic but find it irresistibly quotable), tater tots are the shit. Red and I were stoked to be able to put them on top of a veggie casserole (carrots, celery, onions, shrooms, TVP, tomatoes) and call it dinner. Oh, there was beer involved, too.

The rest of the portabella strips we got for a dollar because they were getting old. The mushroom lady told us to cook them that very day, so we did:


We added them to the leftover spaghetti pie sauce. When in doubt as to what to do with your random/tired veggies, add them to a sauce!

Our final dish was African Sweet Potato Soup from 30-Minute Vegan. We’d made it before, but I couldn’t remember what it tasted like, so it was a pleasant surprise. Looking back through my old posts, I described it in 2009 as “half hearty vegetable soup, half creamy peanut-ginger bisque.” That is a pretty apt description, I must say. We didn’t have fresh ginger this time, but I think the powdered stuff worked fine. It’s a nice change from regular vegetable soup. We had maybe two cups of diced sweet potato left over, so I just roasted it while the soup simmered.

Thanks for hanging with me through this year’s CSA craziness! Four weeks left. You all are champions. Next week I’ll be back with a post about what I did with a million leftover apples and some Halloween/Samhain photos! Have a happy and blessed holiday (or just a fab weekend).

CSA Week 14: This should be more exciting.

I mean it should be more exciting for you guys. I, for one, am having a blast picking out our veggies each week and cooking them up, and I am already enjoying being back on a regular schedule (see: no more class), but this most recent week might seems a little pedestrian to you. No matter! Pedestrians are better than the rest of us, because they walk while we drive our stupid polluting cars.

We already had quite a bit of food in the fridge, so we basically grabbed our One Straw stuff and went home. There you see another humongous sweet potato—even bigger than the one from the previous week! they grow them HUGE at One Straw!—some chard, a stalk of broccoli, and an average-sized butternut squash. I think it was average, anyway. Seeing it next to that mutant sweet potato makes me doubt myself.

I flaked out on the pictures, my darlings. The broccoli we steamed, and you don’t really need to see that, do you? I should have really done better on the rest of our meals, because Red took the lead this week, and his efforts are always exceptional. Example: We had that chard, some onions, and random portabella stems in the fridge. I had meant to sauté them, but I got busy or tired or sad or something and went to my last class after leaving him with vague instructions to…do something with our orphan veggies. When I came home, he had diced and stirred and simmered everything with marsala and Bragg’s for a lovely improvisational meal. It was excellent over rice. And you can’t see it, because I suck.

He brought the noise again on Friday, while I sat in traffic for two hours trying to get home. (It was rain, Baltimore. Not the zombie apocalypse.) Friday happened to be the autumnal equinox (remember?), so of course we wanted our food to match. While I sat at red lights and read random articles on my work phone (I still hate you, Crackberry, but you stopped me from committing rush-hour homicide), my awesome husband mashed that sweet potato into submission and popped our first risotto of the season into the oven. Soon after I finally stumbled through the door, we enjoyed cinnamon-spiced mashed sweet potatoes and that fabulous butternut risotto with sage and red onions. I didn’t get a pic of the mash, but here’s the risotto in all its glory:

If you get right up close to the monitor, maybe you can smell it.

He is a fucking keeper, I tell you what.

Ye olde Thanksgiving post.

This year, I didn’t have the energy to rant about all the shitty aspects of Thanksgiving that usually chap my vegan ass. That’s okay, because I checked that box last year. My outlook hasn’t mellowed, but the day itself was less dramatic since Red and I had only one family observance to attend. (No, I haven’t been disowned—my folks went down South to visit my sister and her significant other.) Once we figured out where to go and when, all that was left was to hash out what psycho-delicious foodstuffs to make.

And make them we did, readers.

Here we have Vegan with a Vengeance’s Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables—specifically, butternut squash, delicata squash, sweet potatoes, and multicolored carrots. Did you know that carrots come in purple? Well, now you do. I even had some fresh ginger hanging around, and it added a brightness that powdered ginger doesn’t always have. Everyone loved these.


Garlic-roasted broccoli! It never fails. Red and I haggled over the amount of garlic to add, because while neither of us is happy until we’ve ingested enough garlic to render us unkissable, not everyone feels the same. We compromised, and ended up with broccoli that was just garlicky enough.


Green bean casserole. Every year I make this to take to my granddad’s house at Christmas, and every year my aunt complains that it’s all gone before she gets any. Red says that’s because half of it immediately ends up on my plate. I first made it the first and only time I ever hosted Thanksgiving, a few months after I moved to Boulder. Now, it’s become a tradition. I can’t find the recipe online, but this one is pretty close. Skip the diced onion and instead of those stupid French-fried onions, sprinkle sliced or slivered almonds on top. Also, use fresh or frozen green beans, not canned. Canned veggies are gross (except for tomatoes and legumes). I used fresh because I had Red to trim and slice them. He reports that kitchen scissors are very good for this.


This will give you an idea of what the recipe I have looks like:

I was so poor I didn’t want to waste printer paper or ink by printing it out.

Sweet potato biscuits:

Since our CSA is over, we bought sweet potatoes and were surprised to be reminded that most sweet potatoes are orange. Our CSA ones were always yellow.

Once it was established that the biscuits contained sweet potato and not cheese (WTF?), they were a hit. I ate the last four all by myself, but three of those were for breakfast the next day.

Here’s my plate, with all that yumminess piled on it:


Of course, I couldn’t show up without dessert. Red’s parents had given us a bag of Granny Smith apples (my favorite), so an apple pie or crumble of some sort was the logical choice. I went with Gingerbread Apple Pie from Vegan with a Vengeance, and it was an excellent decision. Make this pie! Now! Even if you skip peeling the apples like we did, it’ll rock your socks off. It is awesome for breakfast, as well.


And that was pretty much it. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving, happy Thursday, and happy day in general.

CSA Week 22: Fennelicious.

These last few CSA recaps are gonna be kind of weird, kids, because we did some random things with our produce. (Minds. Out of the gutter. Now!) So, here we go:


Our first fennel! What an odd vegetable. It took me a little Internetting to figure out what to do with it, but eventually I put the feathery little leaves in a baggie in the freezer (to flavor a soup or something later) and roasted the bulb with the broccoli and purple cauliflower. It was yummy! The cauliflower wasn’t nearly as purple once it was cooked, though, which was a disappointment.


Another pointy cabbage! Half of this one went into a tofu stir-fry. The other half…is still in the fridge. I know, I know. It’s still hanging in there, though. Cabbage seems pretty resilient.


By this time, we had so many goddamn sweet potatoes I couldn’t tell you when we’d accumulated all of them. I think they multiplied, like mogwai. Red baked three of them, one of which went into biscuits and the other two we ate straight up. After that, we still had six pounds of sweet potatoes left. I know, because I weighed them. Rather, I weighed myself, then hopped back on the scale holding the bag o’ tubers. I gave half to my parents and half to my friend Kelly, and sweetened the deal with Sparkled Ginger Cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance. If you have unwanted veggies you need to unload, I highly recommend making them part of a package deal with delicious baked goods.

I was tired of thinking about what to do with all our veggies, so the green peppers and spinach went into a skillet with some garlic, then into some pasta, then into my belly. That, darlings, is my fallback. I could probably live on pasta with sautéed vegetables.


Oh, and we got a butternut squash too. That’s still hanging out, waiting for Thanksgiving!

I have been busy, darlings.

Please forgive my absence this past week. You see, my lazy ass went on a post-Thanksgiving honeymoon. A lovely one, to Sanibel Island, Florida. I did my best to ignore reality while we were there; hence, no bloggy goodness. I’ll do my best to make it up to you.

Oh, we had a wonderful time, thanks. It was warm and sunny and we lay on the beach and collected shells and found what is probably the only Steelers bar in Florida. I met a gopher tortoise, too. As usual, I am in one place and my camera is in another, so I’ll post those pictures soon. I also plan to do a “Vegan Sanibel” rundown, since I had a hell of a time figuring out where we might eat when we got there. If I can save another vegan the trouble of scrolling through dozens of websites and squinting at menu PDFs, it will all have been worth it.

I know, I owe you a Thanksgiving with the Turkeys post, too. For now, content yourselves with Deb’s awesome recap. Her photos are better and she’s a regular sanctuary volunteer who knows all the animals, so she’s pretty much cooler and more authoritative than I am in every way.

Thanksgiving? We did that too. It was surprisingly not fraught with angst and sadness over the murdered turkeys. I noshed on steamed asparagus and roasted butternut squash with shallots with Red’s family, washed down with plenty of Asti and a nameless drink that involved green apple rum and Sprite. (I might start calling it an “Uncle John,” since he mixed it for me.) At my parents’, my garlic mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie were well received. My mom made the stuffing with vegetable broth and I brought Sweet & Sara’s marshmallows for the sweet potatoes. I even introduced my family to the joys of Earth Balance! Two menu omissions yielded unintentional hilarity: my sister made a fabulous gourmet bisque, including vegan servings, and we forgot all about it until we were halfway through dinner. It has since been frozen, to be thawed and enjoyed this weekend. Shortly after that, my mom realized that we’d also forgotten to prepare the portabella caps I’d brought for Red and me. They were to be broiled with stuffing, but we didn’t miss them at all. Enjoy the free shrooms, Mom.

As I may have mentioned, Thanksgiving also marked Red’s first day as a vegetarian. Go, husband! I’m proud of him, so if you want to say hi, hit him up. I’m going to try to persuade him to post his thoughts on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

On the Go Max Go front: We have since devoured both the Buccaneer and Mahalo bars. I was never a big Three Musketeers fan, so the Buccaneer was fine. I did love Almond Joys, though, and found the Mahalo a bit sticky and gummy. I mean, I’m not going to turn my nose up at almonds and coconut, but I won’t be longingly pining for one anytime soon. Look at that, I’ve gone and given myself a chocolate craving.

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.