This post is dedicated to my Aunt Lynn, who never leaves home without her trusty container of Old Bay.

Tonight, being a native Baltimoron, having recently returned from the beach, and in a summery state of mind, I wanted a Old Bay-flavored – but not necessarily a seafood-inspired – meal. And as you may have noticed, when I don’t know what else to make, I make soup. So tonight: Old Bay Lentil Soup.

Old Bay Lentil Soup

1 onion, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
4 large cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 medium potato, chopped
1 can diced tomatoes (I used fire-roasted)
6 cups vegan broth, any flavor
1 cup pardina, de Puy, or green lentils
2 small or 1 large summer squash, chopped
1 small bunch rainbow chard, chopped
2 bay leaves
2 tsp fresh or 3/4 tsp dried thyme
2 Tbsp Old Bay seasoning (or to taste)
Tabasco, to taste
salt and freshly-ground pepper, to taste
freshly-squeezed lemon, optional

Heat some oil in a large soup pot or Dutch oven, then add the onions and carrots and cook for 10 minutes, adding the garlic after 5.

Add the potatoes and tomatoes and cook for another 3 minutes, then add the stock, bay leaves, lentils, and Old Bay. I have no idea if Old Bay is an acquired taste or not, so if you’re not already a fan of it and 2 tablespoons sounds like a lot to you, add it in small doses, tasting it as you go along until it’s to your liking. I really probably used more than 2 tablespoons. Also, Old Bay is quite salty so don’t salt the soup until the Old Bay is at the level you prefer.

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for half an hour.

Meanwhile, admire my beautiful, not-quite-baby rainbow chard: smaller and more delicate than most bundles of chard and even more delicious.

Add the squash, chard, Tabasco, and thyme to the pot …

… then cover and simmer another 15 minutes or until done, adjusting the seasonings if necessary.

Serve with more Tabasco and a squeeze of lemon if desired.

As lentils are one of my most favorite foods and Old Bay one of my most favorite flavors, this was a real winner, and was quick and easy to boot. A great, simple summertime meal for a work night.

While stocking up on one of my favorite ingredients, lentils, the other day, I came across pardina lentils. I didn’t know what they were at the time, but grabbed them anyway, later learning they are Spanish lentils, somewhat smaller and greyer than your basic brown lentil, that keep their shape, similar to French lentils. In fact, after having eaten them I can say they are somewhat like a cross between brown lentils and French lentils. I’m sure I would have found something to do with them, but I decided to just make the recipe on the back of the package, and it turned out well.

Old World Spanish Lentil (Pardina) Stew
adapted from the back of the Goya package

8 ounces pardina lentils
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 green pepper, chopped
2 large or 4 small cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1/4 cup tomato sauce
1 bay leaf
1/4 tsp thyme
4 cups vegan “chicken” broth (or veggie broth)
1 link vegan chorizo

Note: I didn’t have any soyrizo on hand, but I did have Italian-style vegan sausages. So I used those and to the spices above added: 1 pequin pepper (a very hot dried pepper), 1/2 tsp ancho chili powder, and 1/2 tsp smoked paprika.

Bring a soup pot to temperature over medium heat. Add some olive oil, then add the onions and green pepper and cook until soft.

Add the garlic and spices and cook for one minute.

Add the tomato sauce and cook for another minute.

Slice the chorizo thinly:

Add the broth, lentils, and chorizo.

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 40 minutes or until lentils are soft, then remove the bay leaf.

Serve!

An easy, quick, cheap, filling, simple meal. Good for the 106th straight evening of thunderstorms we’ve endured. Seriously, I love thunderstorms, but this is getting ridiculous. Last weekend I got on the pool, but I still haven’t gotten in the pool. I floated around on a raft last weekend, reading, but when I stuck my arm in the water, it went numb almost instantly from the cold. Fortunately, although it’s been stormy nearly every day, we did get a few warm days so the water temperature is rising, but the forecast just calls for more thunderstorms and cooler-than-normal temperatures, all of which is wreaking havoc on the pool and driving me crazy! I’m battling algae, which has never been a problem for me in the past, but it’s hard to take care of the pool when there are storms every single night and pool maintenance requires sticking a long metal pole into a large body of water, which I think is a recipe for exactly what you are NOT supposed to do during a lightening storm. Sigh. Hello, summer? Come in, summer? Where are you, summer?

Hello. I’m just checking in with the ole blog. I haven’t cooked anything all that blog-worthy this week. What I’ve been doing, in fact, is making soup from random things I find in the refrigerator all week because I haven’t felt like going to the grocery store or having a big to-do in the kitchen. Tonight I used up the rest of a batch of kimchi and some tofu I made that ended up (somewhat curiously) much softer than usual by making soon tubu jjiggae.

I didn’t follow my recipe from last time. I put 4 cups of water on to boil with a piece of kombu. After letting that simmer for 5 minutes or so, I added 1/4 cup vegetarian fish sauce (just omit if you don’t have it) and 2 vegan “beef” bouillon cubes, as well as some shredded dulse, what was probably about a cup of kimchi, 3 big spoonfuls of gochujang (Korean red pepper paste), and my too-soft tofu, chunked, and let it all heat up. Then I removed the kombu and topped with scallions. REALLY fast and easy. Almost ridiculously so.

The whole spread; I also made some rice and I’d stopped and picked up a couple of items for banchan:

I didn’t take a photo, mostly because it didn’t look very pretty, but last night I cleaned out half the refrigerator by making soup. I had most of an onion in the fridge that had been peeled and needed to be used, so I chopped that up and sautéed it with a couple of carrots that were getting old, adding in a bunch of halved grape tomatoes near the end. What I didn’t have, *gasp*, was garlic, so I added a bunch of garlic powder (I shudder at the thought, but fortunately Penzeys’ stuff is good) and also some asafoetida just to be on the safe side. Then I added 6 cups stock and what was probably about 3/4 cup leftover homemade pizza sauce, some red pepper flakes, thyme, and parsley and brought to a boil. Then I dumped in maybe 1/2 cup lentils de Puy. and the rest of some savoy cabbage I had to get rid of, maybe a cup or so, chopped. At this point the soup actually looked fairly decent. However, after putting a lid on it and simmering for 20 minutes, the lentils made it all muddy and it didn’t look as pretty. Then I added 1/2 cup alphabet pasta and a chopped zucchini that was about to see better days and simmered until the pasta was done. I tore up some stale sourdough bread left over from the weekend’s baking, put it in a bowl, and ladled the soup over it. It wasn’t pretty, but damn did it taste good. Sort of shockingly good considering practically all of it was leftovers. It was so good I ate three bowlfuls and then could barely move the rest of the night: it was that filling. I polished the rest off for lunch today.

And that is my pretty boring post. Have you noticed a trend here? When I don’t know what to make, I throw things into a pot with some stock and call it soup. Bizarrely, it almost always tastes amazing. I don’t know why. Luck, I guess.

I’m about to build an ark here in Northern Virginia. How I miss that 90-degree weather from a couple of weeks ago. It’s hard to believe I’m having the pool opened in a week. I’m going to be out there cleaning the pool while wearing a winter jacket if the weather doesn’t start cooperating. I’m wondering if I should invest in a wetsuit.

Here’s an incredibly easy soup I made as a late afternoon snack at work today. Before leaving the house, I broke off a 3″ piece of dried kombu to take with me and put a tablespoon of miso (use white or red), 1/2 teaspoon of wakame, and 1/4 cup julienned chard in a small Tupperware container. (If I’d had any, I’d have taken 1/4 cup diced tofu and/or a tablespoon of chopped scallions.) When I got into work, I put the kombu in a microwave-safe bowl and filled with about a cup of water, maybe a little more. Then I let the kombu soak while I went about my job:

This made a kombu dashi. When I was ready to make the soup, I removed the kombu (you could also snip it into bite-sized pieces with scissors and return it to the soup to eat, but I don’t like the texture). I stirred in the miso, wakame, and chard.

Then I heated it in the microwave for a minute and a half – you don’t want it to come to a boil.

And that was it: miso soup with no effort. Satisfying on a dreary, rainy, cold day.

I also got home pretty late tonight and wanted something very quick and easy for dinner. More soup, of course. It’s really a soup kind of day here. (I think every day is a soup kind of day.) I bought a huge bag of these frozen “kimchee vegetable dumplings” at the new Lotte Plaza the other weekend. I just threw about ten dumplings (for me and Mark) into a pot of simmering veggie broth (any flavor; I used “chicken” tonight), added some julienned carrots, the currently ubiquitous rainbow chard, and a splash of sesame chili oil, and heated the dumplings through, which takes about 5 minutes.

Notice the pretty bowl I also got at Lotte! And, uh, the chopsticks I also got at Lotte. I have a compulsion to buy housewares in Asian markets. I can’t stop myself. I really have more chopsticks than a person needs to own in a lifetime. In my defense, I prefer them to forks, even for non-Asian foods. Also, they cost a whopping dollar a set. Cut me some slack!

Anyway, the dumplings are pretty good. The first time I had them, I thought I had misread the ingredients label because I thought they might have pork or something in them, but I have checked it carefully and it’s all soy: “soybean curd” and “soybean protein”.

Then I had a run-in with a carrotsquid:

(Mark and I actually keep a huge stash of googly eyes in the kitchen for just such emergencies as this one. Is that weird?)

My lunch at the office most days consists of leftovers from dinner the night before. Every once in a while, however, I end up without something to take for lunch. What I will often do on those mornings is throw together a very quick soup. It’s little more effort than buying canned soup, yet tastes better, is cheaper, and is better for you. I keep dehydrated veggies, such as celery and bell pepper on hand for real time crunches, although if time allows, I will use fresh. If you use fresh, just chop them finely so they cook quickly. Although this is usually a weekday meal, I made it this morning (Sunday) for breakfast because I went on a spice extravaganza at Penzey’s on Friday (there’s a store near my office) and after filling all my spice jars at home later, had small amounts of some of the dehydrated veggies left over that didn’t fit, so I figured I’d use them up. And I wanted breakfast in a hurry!

Better-Than-Canned Vegetable Soup

1/2 onion, chopped finely (you can used dried minced onion if you are really out of time – I’ve done so many times)
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed (you can use garlic powder, maybe 1/2 tsp, if you want to be even faster)
1-2 Tbsp dehydrated celery (or 1-2 stalks fresh, chopped finely)
1-2 Tbsp dehydrated bell pepper (or 1/2 pepper, chopped finely)
1-2 Tbsp dehydrated tomato (or just use more tomato sauce, or canned diced tomatoes, or 1/2 fresh tomato, or whatever you want)
4 cups vegan broth, any flavor
1/3 cup tomato sauce or 2 Tbsp tomato paste – what I often use, including today, is leftover pizza sauce: that’s what’s in the red refrigerator box above.
freshly ground pepper and other spices/herbs to taste – my pizza sauce had oregano and red pepper flakes in it, so I didn’t add any more seasonings and it was perfect
1/3 cup small pasta shapes, such as alphabet, tiny shells, orzo, small macaroni, etc.

If you are using fresh onions and/or garlic, put a small soup pot over medium heat on a burner, and add a small amount of olive oil to heat up while you prep the onions and/or garlic:

Then saute the onions and garlic for a few minutes.

If you are using dried onion and garlic, just put the soup pot on the burner and turn it on. Add the broth, turn up the heat, and bring to a boil.

Add all the dehydrated veggies.

Measure the pasta.

Add the pasta and tomato sauce to the pot, as well as any seasonings.

Turn down the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes. When I’m making this before work, this is when I’ll go hop in the shower or eat breakfast. Since I’m not working today and wasn’t in a hurry, I spent the 15 minutes doing this:

Taste the soup and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Let it cool – at least slightly – before placing a serving into a container for transport to work, or just dig in.

It’s not a culinary masterpiece, but it’s decent, costs next to nothing, and doesn’t contain all the sodium (and in many cases high fructose corn syrup or other sugars) of canned soups, and considering the small deli in my office building contains very few vegan options, it saves me a trip out of the building in search of lunch.

This morning I was thinking about what I could do with the extra can of jackfruit I had leftover from making jackfruit tacos, when it dawned on me that the texture of cooked jackfruit would cause it to stand in very well for crab, and I suddenly decided I wanted to make crab soup. I remembered I had two crab soup recipes from my mom’s recipe box, but when I looked them over, neither seemed particularly appealing. One of them included all sorts of things I can’t even identify like “ham hock” and weird parts of cow. (I think that recipe was really “Old Bay soup” and not “crab soup”, though it also had crab in it. I don’t think most Maryland crab soup has heaps of weird meat in it.) The other was more my speed but called for a lot of frozen vegetables, where I’d rather use fresh. So I simply set out on my own.

The first thing I did was soak some dried lima beans. Now, I haven’t been entirely truthful with you. I’ve made it sound as if the only vegan food I don’t like is mushrooms. But the fact of the matter is, I also dislike baby lima beans. I’ve always hated them. At least, I think I still dislike them. I should probably try them again and make sure, but one just sort of rarely comes across lima beans in one’s daily travels, so I never even think of them. It’s kind of a pain to be vegan and hate mushrooms because people always want to feed mushrooms to vegetarians, often as a meat substitute. But no one cares if you hate lima beans because everyone else hates lima beans too. Or at least rarely eats them. The good news is, however, that I like LARGE lima beans, and I keep dried ones on hand for the infrequent times I realize I want them. So I measured 1 cup of dried large limas into a pot, covered with water, brought to a boil, boiled for two minutes, then turned off the heat and let them soak for an hour (actually, it was much longer, but do it for at least an hour.)

When the soaking water the lima beans are in is cool enough, pop each bean out of its “jacket”. Now, I hate hulling soybeans in this fashion and refuse to do it (I crack them while they are dry, then rinse the hulls off), but it’s actually kind of satisfying to hull large limas: they pop right out. It’s almost like popping bubble wrap. Return each hulled lima to the water to continue soaking.

Next I made the “crabmeat”:

Mock Crabmeat

1 large can young green jackfruit, packed in water (make sure it is “young green” jackfruit and that it’s not in syrup)
4 cups water
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp dry mustard
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
all the seaweed you can find in your house, totaling about 1/4 – 1/2 cup depending on the type. I used kombu, dulse, hiziki, and arame.

Place the water in a pot and add the rest of the ingredients except the jackfruit. Bring to a boil.

Drain the jackfruit and rinse.

Add the jackfruit to the pot …

… reduce heat, cover, and simmer for a half an hour or until jackfruit is tender …

… then drain, allowing the seaweed to cling to the jackfruit.

Now you can assemble the soup. That is, if you have Old Bay on hand, you may assemble the soup. If you don’t, you’re going to have to get some. I’m sorry if that upsets you. Ordinarily I consider all of my recipes sort of suggestions or starting points and assume that if anyone makes them, they’ll make substitutions and changes as they see fit, because that’s how I approach all recipes that I read. In this case, however, I really must insist you use Old Bay. Maryland Crab Soup contains Old Bay: end of story. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, crabs ARE Old Bay. I don’t know that there are many traits that I have that mark me as a native Marylander, but if I have one, it’s that I know that crabs in any form require Old Bay. I think a lot of large grocery stores in the United States – even those that are not on the East Coast – carry Old Bay, but you can get it online. Heck, if you ask me to, I will MAIL you some Old Bay. I really will!

Maryland “Crab” Soup

1 recipe mock crabmeat (recipe above)
1 cup dried lima beans, soaked
1 large onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1/2 small head garlic (about 6 cloves), minced or pressed
1 red chili pepper, minced (can substitute hot sauce or dried chili flakes, or omit if you are a sissy)
4 carrots, chopped
2 medium potatoes, diced
2 cups green beans, trimmed and chopped or french-cut
1 cup fresh or frozen corn kernels
1 can diced tomatoes (I used fire-roasted)
1 small can tomato sauce
3 cups vegan “beef” stock
3-4 Tbsp Old Bay seasoning
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

You’ll want to cook the lima beans separately. If you have a pressure cooker, you can do this quickly: pressure cook for about 5-7 minutes, until they are soft, then drain. Otherwise, boil the limas in water for 2-4 hours or until soft. They won’t cook in the soup because the acidity of the tomatoes interferes.

Chop the onions, carrots, celery, and potatoes. Mince or press the garlic. Mince the hot pepper. Chop or french cut the green beans.

In a large soup pot or a Dutch Oven, heat some oil, then add the onions and fry over medium heat for 3 minutes.

Add the celery, garlic, and hot pepper; fry for 2 minutes.

Add the carrots and fry for 1-2 minutes.

Add the diced tomatoes and the tomato sauce.

Add the “beef” stock, potatoes, and any seaweed leftover from the jackfruit cooking.

Shred the jackfruit using your fingers. It should fall apart easily.

Add the green beans, jackfruit, corn, cooked limas, Old Bay, and Worcestershire sauce to the soup.

I chopped the carrot greens up and added them to the soup as well. You could also use parsley. Or you can skip it.

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for an hour.

Serve with saltines or a crusty bread. Goes well with beer.

Is it really spring?! I noticed this one random, lonely flower in the middle of our yard today.

Happy Spring!

By now most of you have probably heard about Monday being the Chinese New Year, this year being the year of the ox. I wanted to celebrate but had something to do Monday night so I had to postpone my celebration. Yesterday may have been ideal for implementing my celebratory plans, as the weather was all sorts of snowy and icy and I worked from home, meaning I should have had plenty of time to make dinner, however, I wasn’t hungry at dinner time because I ate lunch too late. So tonight it is Chinese New Year at Mark and Renae’s! The holiday is traditionally celebrated over 15 days anyway, so I don’t feel too bad about being a couple of days late.

I just wanted something light for dinner tonight so this is not an elaborate feast, but I did do something special and that is I made pot sticker wrappers from scratch for the first time. I usually buy pre-made wrappers from Super H, and frankly, although they consist of no more than flour and water, making my own never even occurred to me. I’m not really good with things that need to be rolled out evenly. It seemed like an unfathomable amount of work. As I mentioned earlier, though, the weather is being stupid here and I didn’t have any wrappers in the house. And I’d seen Jes’s pot stickers on Cupcake Punk the other day, which inspired me. So, home early tonight, I embarked on my first pot sticker wrapper journey. The journey wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be!

These recipes were adapted from Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine.

Pot Stickers

Filling:
1 1/2 cups vegan ground beef substitute, either a commercial product (which I used because I had leftovers) or TVP reconstituted in water or vegan “beef” stock
1 carrot, minced
1 parsnip, minced – this is a weird addition and very optional; I only included it because I have parsnips I have to use up
1/2 onion, minced – I’d have used a bunch of scallions instead of the onion if I’d had any
2″ piece of ginger, minced
5 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 Tbsp soy sauce

I used a chopper to mince the veggies:

Mix with the remaining ingredients in a medium bowl.

Next up, the wrappers! Feel free to buy them pre-made, though. I won’t think any less of you! (Do check that they are vegan, I’ve seen egg in them on rare occasion.)

Wrappers:
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp very hot water

Mix the flour and water together, either with a wooden spoon (or your hands) in a bowl, or in a food processer.

If using a food processor to knead, pulse for about 30 seconds. If kneading by hand, knead for about 5 minutes.

Roll dough out into a long “rope”.

Cut off a piece about 1″ long and flatten a bit. As you are working, keep the unused dough covered with a wet tea towel to prevent it from drying out.

Using a rolling pin, roll the lump of dough out into a thin circle about 3 1/2″ in diameter.

I rolled out about 5 wrappers, then filled and sealed them, then rolled out 5 more wrappers, etc. For sealing the filled wrappers, you have two choices: you can either use a pot sticker press or you can pleat them by hand. Until tonight, I have always used a press because I figured it was really hard to do by hand. I was wrong; it’s really pretty simple and nearly as fast as using the press once you do it once or twice. I had to do about half of my dumplings by hand tonight whether I wanted to or not because my wrappers were too small for the press. In either case, have a small bowl of water handy.

To use the press, lay the wrapper on the open press:

Place a scant tablespoon of the filling in the center:

Dip a finger in the bowl of water and rub it along the outer edge of half of the dumpling. Then close the press and squeeze lightly.

Open the press and remove the dumpling.

To pleat by hand, place a wrapper in your palm and then place a scant tablespoon of filling in the center.

Lightly wet half of the outer edge with your finger as described above, then fold the dumpling in half, squeezing the edges together to seal.

Starting on one side of the folded dumpling, make a pleat like this:

Continue pleating the entire semi-circle:

Here is a dumpling made using a press (on the left) next to one hand-pleated (on the right):

Continue until either all the dough or all the filling is gone – hopefully they are about even – placing the filled dumplings on a cookie sheet and covering with a towel so they don’t dry out.

To pan fry, heat a large skillet until hot. Add a tablespoon of oil (I used peanut oil with a bit of sesame oil mixed in, as Bryanna suggested) and tilt the skillet until it is coated evenly. Place as many dumplings as you can fit into the skillet without overlapping, pleated side up.

After two minutes, pour 1/3 cup water into the pan and immediately cover.

Cook until water is evaporated (about 5 minutes). Remove lid and if necessary, continue cooking until bottoms are brown and crispy:

The dumplings will have puffed up a bit.

To freeze leftover (un-fried) dumplings, place the dumplings in a single layer on a cookie sheet and cover with plastic wrap to avoid freezer burn.

When they are frozen, remove from the cookie sheet and place in a freezer bag. Cook them exactly as you would fresh dumplings: no need to thaw.

Serve pan-fried dumplings with a dipping sauce. I usually just throw together a couple tablespoons of soy sauce, shaoxing wine (substitute dry sherry), vinegar, hot chili oil, and garlic. Your dipping sauce could be as simple as soy sauce and vinegar or soy sauce and sesame oil.

Although I wasn’t hungry for an elaborate meal, eating nothing but pot stickers for dinner seemed a little wrong, so I also threw together a very fast soup. I just flipped through the same cookbook to find a soup that was very quick to make and called for only ingredients I had on hand. This one fit the bill perfectly (though I had to use frozen instead of fresh spinach).

Tofu and Spinach Soup

2 1/2 cups vegan broth or stock, any flavor
1/2 cup frozen spinach
1 ounce bean thread noodles
1/2 cup tofu, cubed
1 1/2 Tbsp shaoxing wine
1 Tbsp soy sauce
Sichuan pepper, to taste (optional)

Place all ingredients into a small pot. Season with sichuan pepper if you’d like.

Cook for 5 minutes. Eat.

And that was my little Chinese New Year celebration! Happy Year of the Ox everyone!

My first mistake was informing Mark it is Robbie Burns Night. My second mistake was reminding him, as I do every year, what Robbie Burns Night is. My third and final, fatal, mistake was admitting that yes, I’m making vegan haggis.

Although I’ve been vegetarian for five times longer than Mark, and although I swear it does not resemble nor taste a thing like real haggis (which I assume is true although I have no idea what real haggis looks or tastes like), Mark absolutely refuses to so much as try a bite of anything I refer to as “haggis”. What I should have done is told him it was “meatloaf” (though we just had meatloaf on Friday, which was poor meal planning on my part), or anything but haggis. I made it once before, the first Burns Night after we were married. It seemed appropriate: we were married in Scotland, so the country holds a special place in my heart. Mark, however, ate nary a bite. So for subsequent Burns Nights, I’ve not bothered with the trouble of making a haggis no one is going to be eating but me. This year, however, I am the proud author of a food blog, so I felt somewhat obligated to celebrate. Even if haggis is really, really disgusting.

The first time I made vegan haggis, I used this recipe or something very like it (sans mushrooms, of course). I tried telling Mark – truthfully – that it tasted like stuffing, which he loves, but he wasn’t having it. This year I did my typical glance-at-a-few-different–recipes-then-make-something-up routine. This is what I did:

Vegan Haggis

2 Tbsp barley
2 Tbsp green lentils
1/4 cup steel cut oats (I used Irish oats, sue me)
1/2 cup vegan “beef” broth
1 Tbsp Marmite
1/2 large onion, minced
1 stalk celery, minced
1 parsnip, minced
3/4 package vegan “ground round”
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp rubbed sage
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Note: I used commercial “ground round” because I had a package that was set to expire. Next time I might try bulgur or something more natural.

In a small pot, cook the barley in 1/2 cup water for half an hour.

In another small pot, cook the lentils in 1/2 cup water for half an hour.

Toast the oatmeal briefly in a frying pan over medium heat.

Mix the broth and Marmite together, then add the oatmeal. Cover and set aside.

(I added the seasonings in this step, but I’ll instruct you to do it later because I realized it dumb to do it at this step.)

Mince the onion, celery, and parsnip. I used a chopper.

Heat a small amount of oil in a medium frying pan. Add the minced veggies and saute until soft.

Add the “ground round” and seasonings; saute for 3 minutes.

When the lentils are done …

… drain them …

and add to the “ground round” mixture. When the barley is done …

… drain it …

… and also add to the “ground round” mixture.

Drain the oatmeal, reserving the broth.

Add it also to the “ground round” mixture.

Dump the mixture into the center of a large piece of muslin or heavy cheesecloth.

Mold it into a lump with your hands.

Wrap it up as tightly as you can, securing with kitchen string.

Place the reserved broth and enough water to make 4 cups of liquid into a medium pot, then add the haggis.

Bring to a boil, cover, then reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 1 hour or longer. Remove from broth and allow to cool until you can touch it. Squeeze out as much liquid as you can without smashing the haggis. Unwrap.

(I boiled it because it seemed like what you do with haggis, however, I think next time I might bake it like a meatloaf.)

Serve with gravy.

Apparently you pretty much have to serve haggis with “neeps and tatties”, or mashed turnips and potatoes. I assume most of you know how to make mashed potatoes so I’ll skip that. I took a hint from Bryanna and roasted the neeps first. They got very small in the oven; six turnips barely made two servings.

Mashed Roasted “Neeps”

6 – 8 turnips
olive oil

Trim, peel, and chop the turnips into evenly sized pieces. Place on a baking sheet. Pour a small amount of olive oil into your palms, then rub the turnips with it.

Roast at 375 degrees for 40 minutes or until done. They will have shrunk!

Mash.

This year I tried something new and also made cock-a-leekie soup, the traditional Burns Night starter course. How could I resist making something with that name?! I’m not sure if barley is normal in this soup, but I saw it called for in this recipe and thought it sounded like a good idea.

Cock-a-Leekie Soup

1/2 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 parsnip, chopped
3 leeks, chopped (white and light green parts only)
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
4-6 cups vegan “chicken” stock
1/3 cup barley
1 cup Soy Curls
2 large or 4 small potatoes, chopped
1/2 tsp thyme

Chop the leeks.

Chop the parnsip.

Chop the celery.

Heat some oil in a soup pot, then add the onions. Saute for 3 minutes.

Add the leeks. Saute for 5 minutes.

Add the celery, parsnips, and garlic. Saute another 3 minutes.

Add the broth.

Add the potatoes, Soy Curls, and barley.

Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 30-45 minutes or until barley is cooked.

Serve.

And here is the entire meal. I had leftover gravy from Friday’s meatloaf; you can make your favorite recipe.

I drank wine with mine instead of Scotch, firstly because I don’t generally drink hard liquor, especially on work nights, and secondly because all I have is Irish whiskey (from a Bloomsday celebration, which honestly I take a little more seriously). I might get away with using Irish oats, but surely I’d be in trouble for drinking Irish whiskey on Robbie Burns Night! I also failed to pipe the haggis to the serving table, mostly because I don’t have bagpipes nor know how to play them. To make up for that, though, here is a picture of Ian, the piper from our wedding. Yes, that’s Pig.

Here’s one reason I don’t play the bagpipes:

Nor did I recite any of Robbie’s poetry, for which I have absolutely no excuse other than my Scottish accent is awful.

I’d have made Mark wear the kilt he wore to our wedding, but it’s at his mother’s house (she made it for him!) and every time she tries to get him to take it home with us, he “forgets” it. Sigh. So maybe I failed being very Scottish today. But don’t get me wrong: I love Scotland.

Many of my commutes home from work – which despite living a mere ten miles from my office take up to an hour – are spent contemplating what to make for dinner. Tonight on my way home (via Trader Joe’s), I was thinking that I’ve been so wrapped up in my nerdy database project (now I’m inputting years of records from book journals to track my reading habits) that I’ve been really slacking off in the cooking department, which was fine because I was sick anyway, but bad as far as maintaining a food blog is concerned. It dawned on me suddenly in the midst of my musing that what I wanted for dinner was pho. I think I saw a post about it on another, non-vegan, blog today, or maybe I was just driving by one of the many pho places around here. Pho – perfect! It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s healthy…and I’ve never featured it here! So I grabbed a few things I needed from Trader Joe’s (namely, bean sprouts which I never just “have on hand” and fresh basil) and, feeling very pleased with myself, came up with a probably-extremely-unoriginal title, and here we are.

Faux Pho

8 oz wide rice noodles
6 cups vegan “beef” broth
2 Tbsp Maggi seasoning or soy sauce
2 star anise
1 stick cinnamon
2″ piece of ginger, grated
1 chili, sliced
1 carrot, julienned or grated
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
6-8 oz seitan, shredded or very thinly sliced
several fist-fulls bean sprouts
something green, such as pea shoots (which I grabbed at Trader Joe’s because they looked good) or spinach, etc.
2 fist-fulls basil
1 fist-full cilantro (I couldn’t find any fresh so I used 2 frozen cubes from Trader Joe’s)
3 scallions, chopped

Soak the noodles in very hot water. I like to bring a pot of water to a boil, remove it from the heat, add the noodles, cover, and let them soak for about half an hour. If I need to speed the process up, I turn the heat back on for a couple of minutes.

Grate the ginger. There is no need to peel!

You should end up with, I don’t know, a tablespoon or two?

Gather the star anise and cinnamon stick. I’m fascinated with star anise. I don’t know what to use it in other than pho, so I get really excited every time I make pho and get to break out the star anise.

Meanwhile, bring the broth to a boil, add the ginger, star anise, cinnamon stick, and Maggi seasoning or soy sauce, and simmer for about 20 minutes so the flavors blend.

Prepare everything else while the noodles are softening and the broth is simmering. Julienne or grate the carrot, …

… thinly slice the chili, …

… and thinly slice the onion.

Shred or thinly slice the seitan.

Add the chili pepper to the broth …

… and the onion, carrot, and seitan. Continue simmering for the remainder of the 20 minutes (or longer).

Check the noodles – the best way to to taste one. They should be soft, but not too soft.

When they are done, drain.

When the broth is ready, remove the star anise and the cinnamon stick.

To assemble your bowl of pho, place some of the noodles in a bowl.

Top with the green stuff …

… and the bean sprouts and basil.

Ladle the broth over the noodles and veggies and top with scallions. Garnish with a lime half. (And when I say “garnish”, I intend for you to actually USE the lime! Squirt it over everything to taste – it really boosts the flavor!)

This was really, really good, I thought. It tastes so fresh, it’s so quick and easy, and it was a great way to use up some leftover seitan I had that wasn’t enough to be the basis of an entire meal. I wish I’d thought to make pho when I was sick: it’d have been perfect.

And here is a James Joyce finger pupper/magnet that Mark gave me today!

Isn’t it adorable? James Joyce plays an amusing role in the Story of How Mark and Renae Met, so I find it especially cute.

I’m accustomed to going to Super H and finding unidentifiable vegetables, but generally I can identify everything at Whole Foods and Wegmans. (I’m constantly being asked by other customers to identify vegetables at Whole Foods, in fact, for some reason. I guess I look like a vegetable expert?) Wegmans actually stumped me a while ago with salsify though: a name that sounds like “salsa” and a note on its price tag that it tastes like oysters. I’ve been meaning to buy some and experiment with it for a while and tonight I finally got around to it.

First of all I should confess I’ve never had an oyster. I have no idea what they taste like. I suspect they taste of the sea, but that’s all I know. I think they might be slimy. Honestly I don’t think I’d particularly like oysters. So I had no idea what to do with a vegetable purported to taste like oysters and there aren’t many recipes on the internet. The best-sounding recipe I found was Light and Creamy Oyster Chowder with Salsify, which recommends substituting potatoes for the salsify if you can’t find it. Clever Renae decided to substitute potatoes for the salsify and salsify for the oysters. Ha hah! I looked at a bunch of other oyster chowder recipes, as I am wont to do when trying to replicate something I’ve never had, and they are all very similar: oysters, clam juice, white wine, cream, bacon, and some veggies. I’ve never had clams either, so I don’t know what clam juice tastes like, but again, I figured it tastes like the sea and therefore just dumped some kelp powder into the pot. I thought it smelled of the sea anyway. I doubt it tasted anything at all like either oysters or clams. Nonetheless, it was a fun recipe.

Salsify (Oyster Plant) Chowder

1 onion, diced
1 leek, thinly sliced (white parts only)
1 stalk celery, diced
2 medium carrots, cut into small rounds
1 cup white wine
2 cups veggie stock
1 lb salsify, peeled and chopped
1 lb potatoes, diced
1/2 cup corn
3 Tbsp vegan “bacon” bits
1 Tbsp kelp powder
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 cup vegan unsweetened cream (such as MimicCreme) *
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

When prepping the veggies, place the chopped salsify and potatoes in a bowl of water into which a little bit of lemon juice or vinegar has been stirred to prevent discoloring. I found it tricky to get all of the “bark” off the salsify; some roots were more rough and therefore more difficult to peel than others. Some bits of the peel came off when dunked in the water; you can see them floating in the bowl.

Heat a soup pot over medium heat, then bring some olive oil up to temperature in it. Then add the onions, leeks, carrots, and celery.

Saute until soft and onions are translucent, deglazing the pot with a little of the wine if necessary.

Add the wine, broth, kelp, thyme, and bacon bits.

Add the salsify, potatoes, corn, and cream.

I forgot that MimicCreme sometimes separates when mixed with a hot liquid (it does that in coffee). Had I remembered, I’d probably have added the MimicCreme after the soup was cooked, and just gently heated it. It didn’t separate too badly, though, and mixed right back together when I stirred.

Cover and cook for 40 minutes or until salsify is soft and oystery. Okay, I have no idea what “oystery” means. Season with salt and pepper.

* To make without the cream, substitute one cup non-dairy milk. After cooking, puree about 1/4 of the soup and return to the pot.

Serve with oyster crackers or crusty bread. I made biscuits but it’s a test recipe for Peter Reinhart’s new book so I can’t share. (Mark’s response to the biscuits was, “Peter Reinhart is a genius,” so you might want to pick up the book when it comes out!) Garnish with additional bacon bits.

So how was it, you ask? I thought the chowder was pretty good, albeit a little sweet for my taste until I salted it a little heavier than I usually do. I simply don’t usually cook with cream. (I have the MimicCreme for making ice cream, for which, by the way, it is fantastic.) Next time I’ll probably use soy milk instead (or just more broth) and just puree a bit to thicken it instead of using the cream. I’m not sure salsify really tastes like oysters, or really much of anything, quite frankly. I didn’t enjoy peeling it (the non-knobby roots were fine, but the knobby ones were a pain), so I don’t know that I’d bother buying it again. And I think I still don’t know what oysters taste like, but I also think I’m glad.

Since I always get comments about missing the cats when they don’t help with the meal, I went looking for them before transferring the photos off my camera.

Ever wanted to know what a cat doing a line of coke looks like?

Kidding! It’s FLOUR! From the biscuits! Tigger most certainly does NOT weigh his Columbian contraband on my food scale!

See, he likes to stick his face in flour. He’s very odd.

Have I ever mentioned that I love this guy?

Ms Brachtune has been dividing her time between the pseudo-laptop I made for her in this post and the little nest she’s made for herself by the heater a few feet across the room.

That fluffy thing to the left of her is a pillow I made her out of this faux fur that I bought specifically because it looked like her fur. I had grand plans of using it to made a huge faux bearskin rug…that looks like Brachtune. Yeah, I don’t know where I come up with these insane ideas either. There is something wrong with me. Particularly considering my sewing skills pretty much start and end at snot rags. Needless to say I have a lot of faux Brachtune fur. (I have a lot of real Brachtune fur for that matter.)

As usual, as soon as I snapped the shutter, she was up and heading over to me for some loving.

And one final note: I don’t usually endorse stuff, but sometimes a product that I just love comes along and I want to share. I used to be a major lip balm fiend when I was younger. I don’t know that I bought so much as one tube of real lipstick between the ages of 18 and 25, but boy did I have a plethora of lip balm in every flavor imaginable. I was really addicted to the stuff. I fell on hard times when I went vegan, though, because it is very hard to find lip balm without beeswax. My life became complete once again when I discovered Crazy Rumors last year. This is by far the best of any vegan – or non-vegan – lip balm I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried them all. I just got a shipment with a bunch of their brand-new flavors – trying out Pear & Peppermint now: yum! – and they all smell amazing. They’re moisturizing, feel great (not heavy) on your lips, last a long time between applications, and again, smell incredible. I’m not being paid to say that – I just figure that they are a small company so I’d do my part in spreading the word so they don’t disappear and leave me without my lip balm fix. I actually make the rest of my skincare products, but I was no good at making lip balm. Thank goodness Crazy Rumors is.