On some nights, I have a brilliant idea for dinner. Other nights – I’d venture to say most nights – I whine “what do you want for dinner?” to Mark and stare blankly into the refrigerator assessing the vegetable situation. Tonight was one of the latter nights. Bizarrely, I think I ended up making vegan Spam, but you’ll hear more about that tomorrow. I had to put it in the refrigerator to constrict. Yeah, I know that doesn’t make any sense, but welcome to my world. Anyway, foraging around in the crisper drawers of the refrigerator, I found a head of a cabbage, celery root, and carrots. All of which I decided was going into a soup to accompany some barbeque beans suggested by my friend Abbott George.

Creamy Potato Carrot Soup

My apologies for the photograph you are about to be subjected to. Apparently I forgot how to focus. I usually take a couple of shots of the ingredients to make sure at least one turns out, but apparently not tonight.

4-5 large shallots, or 1 large onion, chopped
1/2 celery root, grated, or 1 stalk celery, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
4-5 red potatoes, diced
4 leaves cabbage, chopped (I used savoy)
6 cups vegan broth or stock
2 Tbsp vegan “bacon” bits
1 bay leaf
freshly ground pepper to taste

In a soup pot or Dutch oven, heat some olive oil, then add the shallots or onions and saute for a couple of minutes.

Add the carrots (my carrot was yellow, don’t be confused!), celery root or celery, and garlic; saute for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop the potatoes and cabbage.

Add the broth or stock, potatoes, cabbage, bay leaf, and bacon bits. Season with pepper to taste.

Bring to a boil, cover, lower heat, and simmer for half an hour or until vegetables are soft.

Remove the bay leaf and puree, either using an immersion blender or in batches in a regular blender, as smooth or chunky as you like.

Serve. I sprinkled a little parsley in the middle for the photo because I’m classy.

Mark’s assessment of the soup: “It may look like puke, but it tastes like happy.” It’s like I said: we’re classy.

Here are the barbeque beans. It was essentially just soy beans in homemade barbecue sauce.

I complained last time about Brachtune (who is currently sitting on my right arm – making typing extremely difficult – and purring loudly) sitting on my laptop, which has been her new favorite thing to do. When she signed me out of Ubuntu and then left my user name a cryptic “while you were out” message (which, again, I didn’t even know you could do), I decided it was the last straw and I set her up her own little pseudo-laptop. Here it is:

I took a heated cat pad that my mother gave me a while ago (I believe to combat the problem of Tigger sleeping on our laptops) and stuck it into a hooded cat bed that I bought Brachtune as a get-well present when her leg was broken earlier this year. She’s been practically living in it since.

This freed up my reading chair for Tigger.

In other news, I scored an awesome antique seltzer bottle at the antique store today, although I was sad to realize at home that it’s missing a part that holds the charger. Fortunately I found one on the cheap on eBay, although it’s coming from the UK so it may take a little while to get here. If you don’t hear from me after a week or so, it’s quite possible Ive managed to blow myself up in a horrible CO2/exploding bottle accident. Honestly, “seltzer bottle” seems like one of those things, like “kitchen torch”, that I shouldn’t be allowed to have, but fortunately for me you don’t have to pass a klutz test to buy one. Let the fizzy drinks begin!

Bryanna posted a recipe for Kadu bouranee, everyone’s favorite Afghani appetizer, yesterday, and I had a pie pumpkin sitting around that was begging to be used in something I’ve never made before, so I decided we were having Afghani food for dinner tonight. Bryanna said she ate it as an entree, but kadu bouranee is too sweet to be more than an appetizer in my opinion so I needed to find an entree. After searching the internet for vegetarian Afghani meals, I gave up and veganized a chicken dish instead. (I don’t know why I couldn’t find anything appealing, because there are plenty of vegetarian dishes at The Helmand in Baltimore.) This recipe from recipes.wikia.com is what I worked from.

Chelo Nachodo: Afghani Chickpea Stew with Rice

5 cups vegan “chicken” stock, divided
1 cup Soy Curls (or vegan “chicken” substitute)
1 can chickpeas, drained
1 large onion, chopped
1 rib celery, chopped
2 large carrots, chopped
1 large zucchini, chopped
1 tsp salt (or to taste)
freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 cup fresh dill chopped
1 Tbsp dry cilantro (or 1/4 cup fresh, chopped)
juice of 1 large lemon

I took the ingredients photo before I realized I didn’t have any chickpeas in the house. I also didn’t have any fresh celery or dill, but as you can see in the photo I was prepared to work around this. The missing chickpeas were a deal-breaker, though, so it was off to Wegmans with me. I took the opportunity to complete the first step while I ran over there, and I picked up some celery and dill while I was at it.

Heat 3 cups of the “chicken” broth to nearly boiling and pour over the Soy Curls. (Omit this step if using some other vegan “chicken” that doesn’t need reconstituting.)

Let Soy Curls sit in broth for 10 minutes or until soft, then drain, pouring the broth through a sieve into the soup pot. Roughly chop the Soy Curls

Add the remainder of the broth to the soup pot and bring to a boil.

You don’t need to get this crazy with the boiling.

Add the Soy Curls, chickpeas, celery, carrots, onion, zucchini, salt, pepper, and cumin to the soup pot.

Return to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to medium low. Cook for 45 minutes.

Juice the lemon. Check out my lovely Jadeite citrus reamer! I love it! If you are willing to accept a few nicks, sometimes you can find deals on this stuff. I don’t mind a couple of dings because I actually use my vintage pieces and am likely to incur a few myself anyway. In fact, it if it’s slightly defective, I’ll be less nervous about using it and I’m happy when I’m not nervous!

Chop the dill.

Add the lemon juice, cilantro, and dill to the soup pot.

Simmer the stew for another 20 minutes, uncovered.

Meanwhile, prepare some rice to accompany the stew. Do NOT follow the instructions in the recipe I linked to for making rice! I was highly skeptical about it, but if any one word describes me it’s “adventurous”, so I tried it anyway. It was Not Good. I don’t know if you can tell from this picture how Not Good it was, but trust me on this.

Fortunately, I am adventurous but also rife with common sense. Anticipating a rice disaster, I stuck a couple of servings of rice in the rice cooker at the same time I prepared the Horrible Rice. I suggest you simply make rice via your favorite method.

The stew will have cooked down a little bit by now and look like this:

Serve the stew over the rice:

… accompanied by the kadu bouranee.

(Mine is pureed unlike Bryanna’s because that’s how they serve it at the Helmand!)

Oddly, this meal (the stew, not the pumpkin) reminded me very much of one that was in heavy rotation during my childhood: Chicken Over Rice. This is odd because my diet as a kid was very American. I think my mom’s Chicken Over Rice was more a chicken-in-gravy sort of thing than a stew, but it definitely reminded me of it anyway. I think my parents would actually eat this! Mark said it was good and very filling, and I think it will make nice leftovers for lunch tomorrow, although it certainly wasn’t as spicy as I’m used to my meals being.

I don’t have much of an intro for this one. I wanted vegetable barley soup so I made some. That’s about the long and short of it. I worked from home today so I was able to bake a loaf of bread, which I thought would be a good accompaniment to the soup, so that worked out well. And it provided enough leftovers for two or three lunches this week. There isn’t really much else to say about vegetable barley soup, except for the fact that I did use a secret ingredient: read the recipe for details!

Vegetable Barley Soup

1 large or three small shallots, diced
2 carrots, chopped into large bite-sized pieces
2 stalks celery, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
5 cups vegetable stock or vegan “beef” broth
1 14.5 pound can diced tomatoes
1 medium or 2 small potatoes, chopped
3/4 cup pearled barley
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen corn
1/2 cup frozen green beans
1 cup frozen pearl onions (I figured if I was using pearled barley, pearl onions were only appropriate)
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
3 Tbsp (or to taste) grated fresh horseradish (the secret ingredient!)
freshly ground pepper to taste

In a large soup pot or Dutch oven, heat a bit of oil and sauté the shallots, carrots, and celery for two minutes.

Add the garlic and sauté for another minute.

Add the broth, tomatoes, and potatoes. Bring to a boil.

Add the frozen veggies, bay leaves, thyme, and smoked paprika.

Return to a simmer, then reduce heat to medium low. Add the secret ingredient, horseradish, to taste. Horseradish wasn’t in the ingredients photo because I didn’t think to add it until after I’d already started making the soup. My culinarily-inclined friend gave me a jar of fresh horseradish that she had preserved last week and I’ve been wondering how I should use it. Then it dawned on me that it might be good in this soup. And it was: it added a nice pungent dimension.

Cover and cook for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. After covering my soup pot, I turned around to find Tigger in his usual spot: sitting – very prim and proper – on the very edge of the kitchen island, half dozing off but retaining a modicum of alertness in case I walk near him (in which case he will stick his paw out, catch my arm in his claws, and pull me over to him).

Tigger is one of those cats who can actually smile. It’s one of the things I love most about him.

So I rewarded him for being so cute by giving him some nutritional yeast, for which he goes bonkers.

Anyway, when you’re finished playing with the cat and the soup is ready, season with freshly ground pepper and remove the bay leaves.

Serve with freshly baked crusty bread. This is a loaf of Jeffrey Hamelman’s Rustic Bread, which like every other loaf I’ve made from this book, came together and baked beautifully.

It was really good used to sop up the soup.

I don’t know why the soup caused this expression on Mark’s face:

He seemed a little disconcerted when he found out that barley was to be a big part of his dinner, so maybe that was the problem, although I’m not sure he was sure exactly what barley was before eating it. He wasn’t quite as rapturous about the soup as he has been about other meals (including Saturday’s Soon Tubu Jjigae), however, I thought it was really very good and I definitely intend to make it again. It’s very comforting.

Leftovers should be even better than the first day, however, barley absorbs a lot of water, so you’ll almost definitely have to thin it out. I find that this condensed version is all the easier to carry to work, though, and at lunch time I just add a bit of almost-boiling water from the hot water dispenser, which also reduces the reheat time necessary in the microwave to about a minute.

One of the best meals I had in San Francisco (and I had a lot of great meals) was the first one: tofu stew at a Korean tofu house in Japantown. As I promised at the time, I decided to replicate it tonight.

There aren’t many vegan recipes for soon tubu jjigae on the internet, in fact, I didn’t find any. Everyone seems to want to put clam juice, beef, and shrimp in it. And egg. But none of that stuff is necessary. The important features of soon tubu jjigage are 1) tofu and 2) spiciness, both of which I can produce in spades.

The first thing you need to consider is your tofu. I wouldn’t dream of making soon tubu jjigage with anything but homemade tofu. The tofu is just too big a part of the dish and I’m used to homemade. So I have to urge you to try making it yourself. I ordinarily make an extremely firm tofu, using as much coagulant as I can get away with without it turning bitter and pressing it under about 25 pounds. Because I wanted a much softer tofu for the stew, I cut back on the amount of coagulant I used (I used nigari as usual, but if I’d been thinking more clearly, I’d have used the calcium sulfate I have because it makes a softer tofu AND adds calcium), and I used just 1.5 pounds (a new bottle of agave nectar, to be precise) to press it.

If you simply can not be bothered to make your own tofu, buy fresh soft tofu from an Asian market if at all possible. If you can’t find fresh, buy the best soft tofu you can find at an Asian market. Sometimes it comes in tubes and it’s usually in the produce department. If you don’t live near an Asian market, you can resort to using silken tofu in a box.

Soon Tubu Jjigae

3 1/2 cups water
1 4″x4″ square kombu
1/4 cup dulse, snipped into bite-size pieces with kitchen shears (optional)
1 handful arame (optional)
2 tsp vegan chicken bouillon (or enough to flavor 4 cups of water at half-strength)
1 Tbsp Korean red pepper powder
6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp sesame oil
1/2 cup cold water
3 Tbsp arrowroot
6 Tbsp gochujang (Korean chili pepper paste) (Susan V of Fat-Free Vegan has a substitute you can make if you don’t live near a Korean grocery store in this post, but get the real deal if at all possible.)
1 cup cabbage kimchi
2 carrots, julienned or shredded
1 pound soft tofu, preferably homemade
1/2 bunch scallions, chopped

Place the seaweed(s) in a soup pot with the 3 1/2 cups of water and simmer for 10 minutes.

Remove the kombu. (You can chop it up into bite-sized pieces and put it back in if you wish.) Add the garlic, red pepper powder, soy sauce, sesame oil, and “chicken” bouillon. Simmer for five minutes.

Mix the cold water and arrowroot together in a small bowl, whisking to ensure there are no lumps, then add to the soup. Add the gochujang, whisking to make sure it is dissolved. Simmer for another five minutes.

Add the kimchi and carrots.

Chop the tofu into 8 large pieces.

Add the tofu to the stew.

Stir the tofu into the stew, allowing it to break up a little bit, but mostly maintaining the chunks.

Simmer for 5 more minutes, then add the scallions.

Raise the heat a little and cook for another couple of minutes. In restaurants, soon tubu jjigae arrives to your table very, very hot, so let it get very bubbly.

I served the soon tubu jjigae in individual-sized cast iron pots, which even have lids to keep the stew warm while I run around taking photographs. Here’s one of the pots:

Mark was fascinated by the “little cauldrons”.

Serve with several banchan.

The verdict on this one was very good. Mark commented that he tasted “several layers of flavor, followed by a nice spiciness.” He proceeded to clean his cauldron, then steal tofu from mine. Afterwards he told me to announce it had the Mark Seal of Approval.

Brachtune doesn’t care much for tofu, or stew for that matter, but she does love chopsticks.

Tigger prefers red pepper.

(His fur is wet because he took a little shower in the kitchen sink. He’s very weird.)

It’s another Pig-approved post!

When my mother saw my Smoked Seitan Butt post and noticed it included vegetarian bacon bits, she thought I might like to try veganizing the following recipe of my grandmother’s:

Bean and Bacon Chowder

1 lb. pea beans (washed)
16 slices bacon (1 lb.)
2 cups chopped onions
2 (28 oz.) cans tomatoes
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. basil
1 (6 oz.) can tomato paste
4 beef bullion cubes, dissolved in 4 cups boiling water
2 T. sugar

Simmer beans in 4 cups water for 3-4 minutes in Dutch oven. Cool 1 hour. Drain water. Fry bacon until crisp; crumble and add to beans. Save bacon drippings. Saute onions in drippings until golden. Add to beans with tomatoes, salt, pepper, basil, tomato paste, bullion and water, and sugar. Cover and simmer 4-5 hours or until beans are cooked. Makes 4 quarts.

So that’s exactly what I did yesterday! Here’s my version; I’ve also halved her amounts:

Bean and Non-Bacon Chowder

8 oz navy beans
1 small or 1/2 large onion, chopped
1 cup diced UnPork
1 28 oz or two 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes (fire roasted is good here)
2 tsp vegan “beef” bouillon
1/4 cup vegan bacon bits
1 Tbsp sugar or 9 drops stevia
1/2 tsp basil
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 cups water

Soak the beans overnight. (Or you can quick-soak them as described by my grandmother above.) Dice the UnPork.

In a Dutch oven (preferably cast iron), heat some olive oil. Add the onions and UnPork …

… and cook until onions are beginning to caramelize and UnPork is crispy, deglazing the pan with white wine (or broth or water) as necessary.

Add the tomatoes and tomato paste and bring to a simmer, then add the bouillon and stir to combine.

Add the rest of the ingredients, …

… cover, and simmer for 4 to 5 hours or until beans are done.

If I had realized that this was going to take 4 to 5 hours even after soaking the beans for what turned out to be 24 hours, I would have made it in the pressure cooker, which I suspect would have taken 45 minutes. I was thinking it would take 2 hours. We probably could have eaten it after 2 hours, but I wanted the beans to be softer, so I kept staving off hunger with a slice of beer bread and waiting another hour…until it was midnight. I also had to add water to thin it back out a couple of times. Next time it is definitely the pressure cooker!

I can’t say that I remember eating this at my grandmother’s, but the aroma was very familiar, so I guess I remember smelling it.

Serve with a loaf of crusty (and preferably beer-filled!) bread and salad.

Something about this chowder made Mark want to pose like a senior portrait. Mark is a unique individual.

This is unrelated to food (although he did write an article for Gourmet magazine), but David Foster Wallace is dead. This is especially shocking to me because I am actually currently reading Infinite Jest. RIP, David.

The Smarkster isn’t feeling well today and among his complaints is that he’s hungry but doesn’t want food. I suggested soup and he asked if I’d make tomato soup. It’s so easy that although I wanted to make it as quickly as possible for him, I figured I might as well take pictures and write it up for the blog while I was at it. I just went to Penzey’s last weekend and have a bunch of new spices I’d love to have played with, but I figured if Smark wasn’t feeling well, it wasn’t the right time to experiment.

Quick and Non-Experimental Tomato Soup

1/4 onion, diced
1 small or 1/2 large carrot, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
14.5 ounces vegetable stock or vegan broth (1 tomato can-full)
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp thyme
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
fresh basil for garnish

Saute the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic in a soup pot.

Add the remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then simmer for 15 minutes.

Remove from heat and remove the bay leaf. Let cool for a few minutes, then blend, either with an immersion blender or in batches in a regular blender.

Reheat if necessary and garnish with fresh basil. I didn’t have any fresh basil so I threw a small cube of frozen basil in the pot and stirred until melted.

Here’s hoping Smark feels better!

Caution, soup is hot!

I forgot to give him a lemon wedge, but if I were serving myself, I’d probably squeeze a little lemon over it. I think fresh lemon brightens everything.

I put a loaf of Jeffrey Hamelman’s beer bread into the oven to bake just before starting the soup. I plan to serve it with dinner.

There are two things that bread bakers hope to achieve in every loaf of bread, but which sometimes seem to happen randomly, perhaps when Fornax is smiling upon you: oven spring and a crust that literally crackles as it begins to cool after removing from the oven. Oven spring is the extra rise you get a couple minutes after putting the loaf into the oven. This you can control a little bit, in fact, scoring (slashing) is done to control how oven spring affects the bread (by giving the crust a location to expand), but it seems like some loaves spring right up in the oven and others don’t much at all – and that the only deciding factor is luck! I’ve made three different kinds of bread from Bread so far and all of my loaves have had great oven spring. And when I pulled this beer bread from the oven, it started crackling delightfully as I was taking its picture!

I have been really happy with the loaves I’ve baked from this book, and there are so many, many loaves to go! It’s an excellent book and the loaves are a pure delight and joy to bake. Everything just seems to go so smoothly when I follow these recipes. If you are serious about learning to bake bread, I highly recommend this book, although it’s pretty intensive and there are only a few photographs (there are simple drawings that illustrate techniques where necessary). If you are thinking only casually of getting into bread baking, you may find Peter Reinhart’s books a bit more accessible. You could start with this book, but you’ll have to be prepared to read in order to learn the techniques…not look at pictures. For someone who pretty much has the hang of the basics of bread baking but who wants more practice, this book is absolutely perfect.

I can’t wait to taste the beer bread. It’s made with roasted barley, whole wheat flour, and BEER! I only made one loaf instead of the two the recipe was scaled for, which meant I had half a beer leftover this morning. Which meant I drank half a beer before breakfast this morning. Was that wrong?

I felt like veganizing another old recipe tonight. This is my grandmother’s recipe for Chili Con Carne, which I picked out because I thought topping it with one of the new Cheezly flavors that arrived Friday would be a good way to test the cheese out. I often find myself wishing I had discovered my interest in cooking long before I did so that I could have apprenticed myself under my grandmother before she died, or better, that she had lived longer. I’m positive she would have happily helped me make vegetarian meals. Here’s the original, rather vague recipe:

Cook ground beef, 2 onions, and pepper until brown. Add 1 can tomatoes and 1 can kidney beans. (Pour broth off kidney beans before adding.) Combine 3 Tbsp. vinegar, 2 tsp. salt, 3 Tbsp. Chili powder, and dash red pepper. Simmer 40 minutes.

So I set about looking for beef substitutes. First I thought of TVP, which would have also been good for nostalgic purposes, reminding me of all the times my college roommate and I made huge pots of Fantastic’s Chili, but I discovered I had less than a cup of TVP. Next I thought of bulgur, which is a great texture for chili, but I had even less bulgur. But I probably had enough of both combined, so that’s what I did. You could use one instead of the other and still have great results, although you may have to adjust the amount of water. Bulgur requires more water than TVP, so just keep that in mind.

Grandmother’s Chili Con Carne

1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 can diced tomatoes (I used fire-roasted)
1 can kidney beans, rinsed
4 cups vegetable or vegan “beef” broth
1/2 cup bulgur
3/4 cup TVP
3 Tbsp vinegar (I used white wine; apple cider would have been good too)
3 Tbsp chili powder
minced hot pepper or hot sauce to taste (reduce the amount of vinegar if you use a vinegar-based hot sauce)

Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, then add a small amount of oil. Add the onions and cook for 2 minutes.

Add the green pepper and cook for another 2 minutes.

Rinse the beans …

… then add to the pot with the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil, …

… reduce heat to medium low, and simmer, covered, for 45 minutes, until the bulgur is soft and the chili is as thick as you desire.

If you like, top with shredded vegan cheese and/or vegan sour cream.

The Nacho-flavored Cheezly was really good, both by itself and on the chili. I love Cheezly. As for the chili, it was good. I will definitely make it again. It was simple, easy, and very fast: a great weekday meal.

As Tigger and I were busy in the kitchen prepping the chili, I heard thundering cat paws in the living room. Quickly and quietly, I grabbed my camera and tip-toed into the room, viewfinder to eyeball and finger on shutter. Despite my stealth, Brachtune, who had been enjoying a Tigger-free reprieve and batting around one of the Cat Toys For Cats, heard me approaching and immediately stopped playing and started walking towards me. It’s so impossible to catch her playing; she always abandons her games and approaches me looking for love.

Then she gets her face so close to the camera, I can’t focus.

It’s much easier when she’s half asleep.

Lentils never fail to remind me of The Young Ones. I don’t think Neil, who was in charge of cooking, ever managed to make a lentil dish that didn’t end up on the floor or with washing powder in it, but he was vegetarian. So this soup is dedicated to poor downtrodden Neil. At least my lentils are edible.

No preparatory photos tonight, I’m afraid. I wasn’t planning to make a post as I was just experimenting and was also very tired from a long and arduous swim. But I quite enjoyed the results so I figured I’d write the recipe up if for no other reason than to remind myself what I did the next time I decide I want lentils, or Neil, Vyvyan, Rick, and Mike come over for dinner.

I’d been thinking I wanted to do something involving both lentils and bulgur, and searches for those ingredients led me to several recipes for Turkish wedding soup, or ezo gelin, so I guess this was inspired by that, although I didn’t use mint, which seems to be an important part of ezo gelin, and I did use a black lemon, which may or may not be used in Turkish food (I’m really not sure). It is a Middle Eastern ingredient. I mostly used the black lemon because I have them and had no idea what else I was going go do with them, so in the pot one went. It turned out to be a great touch. Black lemons are little, black, shriveled-up items that might actually be limes and not lemons. Figure that one out. You can just omit it if you don’t have them. I’m excited to experiment further with them though.

Lentil Soup for Neil

1 sweet onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
4 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
6 cups water or broth (I used 1 Tbsp Better Than Bouillon vegan “chicken” flavor)
1 1/2 cups lentils, red or brown (I used brown, which Neil seems to prefer)
1/4 cup bulgur
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/2 tsp smoked paprika (if you have it)
1 Tbsp sweet paprika
1 black lemon
1/2 tsp cayenne
freshly ground sea salt and black pepper, to taste
lemon wedges for garnish

In a pressure cooker if you have one (or a large pot if you don’t), heat a bit of oil then add the onions and sauté for 5 minutes. Add the carrots, celery, and garlic and sauté for another 5 minutes. Add the water or broth, lentils, bulgur, tomato paste, and spices except the salt and pepper. If using a pressure cooker, cook at high pressure for 20 minutes, otherwise, cook until lentils and bulgur are soft (about 45 minutes). Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with lemon wedges. Don’t try to be all artistic like me and stick the lemon wedges IN the soup because then it’s messy when you go to squeeze them over the soup.

I quite liked this. When I took the lid off the pressure cooker and stuck my spoon in for a taste, I was surprised how good it was, which is when I decided to go ahead and post it even without photos. As far as the black lemon, I think you can grind them up and use them as a powder, but I wanted to find out what happened if I just tossed it in whole. It eventually softened and deflated, then began to disintegrate. The taste it added was tangy without being as tart as lemon juice. I’m going to think of more things to do with the remaining black lemons. If it weren’t nearing 1 a.m. and if I weren’t completely depressed from watching Control, I’d take a picture for you, but we’ll save that for tomorrow, shall we?

I received so many great suggestions when I asked for soysage suggestions that I was nearly overwhelmed! Last night I combined two suggestions and made peppers stuffed with red beans and rice. Since two people suggested it, I decided I’d definitely better make Italian Wedding Soup tonight. I’ve never made Italian Wedding Soup, so in my typical fashion I googled it and looked at a bunch of recipes, then with a general idea in mind, went into the kitchen and did my own thing. It looked like most recipes call for chicken broth, meatballs or sausage, and a bunch of green veggies. Spinach was called for most often, but I did see one recipe that called for a combination of broccoli and broccoli rabe and I really liked the idea of using the latter. (Other than Broccoli Cheez Soup, I’m not wild about regular broccoli in soups.) This soup turned out extremely well and I’ll definitely be making it again.

Italian Wedding Soup

1 1/2 cups chopped vegan “sausage” (I used Soysage from the New Farm cookbook)
7 cups vegan “chicken” stock
1 large leek, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced or pressed (remember I LOVE garlic, so maybe that’s a lot)
5-6 leaves green cabbage, shredded
1/2 bunch broccoli rabe, chopped
1/2 tsp dried thyme or 1 1/2 tsp fresh thyme
1 cup small pasta, such as orzo or tiny shells
freshly-ground black pepper

Brown the chopped “sausage” in a large skillet and set aside.

In a large soup pot or Dutch oven, heat a small amount of oil, then add chopped leeks and sauté for 3 minutes.

Add the carrots, celery, and garlic and sauté for another 3 minutes.

Add the broth, cabbage, broccoli rabe, and thyme.

Bring to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes. Add the pasta and cook for 10 minutes or until pasta is done. Season with pepper to taste. To serve, place soup in a bowl and stir sausage into individual bowls.

Makes about 4 large servings.

Note: if you aren’t using the New Farm Soysage, you may not have to cook and add the “sausage” separately. I happened to notice last night when I made the beans & rice, though, that the Soysage just about completely disintegrated as I fried it with the bean mixture, and I didn’t want my soup to take on the gritty texture of okara. Such a texture might be okay for beans & rice, or even a nice thick stew, but I felt it would ruin Italian Wedding Soup. I think the gluten-based “sausages” I’ve made in past would have held their form if I’d just fried them with the leeks. Honestly, I’m not in love with the Soysage. I guess okara and I just don’t get along.

Anyway, the soup turned out great. When Mark surfaced from his man-cave to get a second serving, he informed me it was great and told me to tell the blog it was great. In fact, he called it “the best soup ever”, although he is prone to superlatives when it comes to my cooking. I’m also supposed to tell you that this soup was like a peanut because “the goodness is all inside”. (Earlier he informed me that I was like a peanut because the goodness is all inside and I asked him if he was trying to say I was ugly. But apparently he’s just into comparing everything to peanuts today.)

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for the Soysage – especially the soup!

Mark went to a friend’s house tonight, leaving me on my own for dinner. I embrace such evenings as opportunities to eat stuff he won’t eat, so tonight found me flipping through a few cookbooks in search of inspiration. I ended up with Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and found myself intrigued by a very Bittman-esque table of “sushi bowl ideas”, the idea being you take a bowl of sushi rice, add a topping from column A, a sauce from column B, and a garnish from column C. Fast, easy, flexible, and scalable, i.e., good for a one-person meal. The only problem with the whole idea of a sushi bowl is Mark would have loved it. This is the boy who at least once a day claims he’s going on an “all-rice diet” (an idea I keep rejecting: “you need to eat a balanced diet”). Nonetheless I was getting hungry, so sushi bowl it was.

I am a fan of tsukemono, Japanese pickles. I make them sometimes, although not as often as I want to. I mean to start making them more often, but in the meantime, I usually have a few packaged kinds on hand to eat as sides with noodles, my go-to dinner when I don’t feel like really cooking. I have a bunch of such tsukemono in the refrigerator, so I chose that suggestion from Bittman’s column A. In column B for that row was something like “seaweed ‘mayo'”, which I almost completely ignored as I wasn’t about to put mayo on my sushi bowl, even if it DOES sounds like something the Japanese would do. But curiosity got to me and I checked out the recipe for “seaweed ‘mayo'”…and was surprised to find out it was not only vegan, but really just seaweed (arame) pureed with a tiny bit of oil and sake. So I whipped that up.

Column C was slivered scallions in this case, but I also added shredded nori and shredded shiso. To shred the nori and shiso, I rolled each up lengthwise, made two cuts lengthwise on the nori and one on the shiso, then snipped the rolls up into small pieces (like chiffonading).

Sushi Bowl

1 1/2 cups sushi rice, prepared
1/2 cup different kinds of tsukemono (Japanese pickle)
2 Tbsp “seaweed ‘mayo'” or other mild sauce
2 Tbsp chopped scallions
2 Tbsp shredded shiso (optional)
1 Tbsp shredded nori (optional)

Cook the rice in a rice cooker or on the stovetop and prepare as if for sushi (cut in sushi vinegar and salt to taste). For the sauce, choose something mild that won’t clash with the pickles, but also non-salty (the pickles are really salty, so a soy sauce-based sauce is probably a bad idea). Place the rice in a bowl, top with the tsukemono, then the sauce, then the garnishes.

Serves 1.

Here’s what it looked like after mixing it all up:

I served it with miso soup, which is incredibly easy to pull together. I discussed in an earlier post how to make dashi. Simply soak a piece of kombu in some water for at least half an hour. If you are in a hurry, you can simmer it instead for 15 minutes. Here’s how I usually make miso soup:

Miso Soup

2 cups water
1 3″ piece of kombu
1 tsp dried wakame
1 splash mirin
1 splash seasoned rice vinegar
2 Tbsp light miso
2 Tbsp chopped scallions
1/4 cup chopped tofu

Soak the kombu in the water for 1-24 hours (refrigerate if longer than a couple of hours), or, simmer it gently for 15 minutes. Remove kombu. This is the dashi. Rehydrate wakame by soaking in warm water for 10 minutes. It will expand considerably, so don’t use too much and give it enough room. Heat dashi in a small saucepan. Add a splash of mirin and a splash of seasoned rice vinegar. Remove 2 Tbsp of the dashi and place in a small bowl. Set aside. Add the scallions, rehydrated wakame, and tofu to the pot.

Add the miso to the reserved 2 Tbsp of dashi and stir until smooth. Add to the pot.

After adding the miso, do not allow the soup to boil. Serve when it has been warmed through.

Makes two servings.

Brachtune read V For Vendetta while we ate. And by “read”, I mean “licked the cover of”.