Leaning Vegetarian

Posts Tagged ‘quick’

I’m home sick from work today, and want something hot and spicy that’ll help knock this crud out of my head and lungs. With impeccable timing, today’s newsletter from The Herb Companion included a recipe for Caldo de Ajo, or garlic soup.

I like this recipe a lot – it’s very much of the ‘add everything to taste’ school, which is how I usually cook unless I’m baking.

The recipe calls for some of my favorite things – garlic in large quantity, black beans, tomatoes with jalapenos. There should be 5 mushrooms in this picture as well, but I’ll plead fogginess from the cold.

Dice the onions and garlic, slice the mushrooms, and julienne the carrots. It’s a good dish when you’re sick, because those are the only things that require energy beyond opening a can. Not to dissuade you from using fresh diced tomatoes, peppers and soaked beans, but this morning, that’s just not happening.

Add a dollop of olive oil to cover the bottom of a medium saucepan, and saute the onions and mushrooms until they’re a bit soft. Add the garlic and add cumin, oregano, and red pepper to taste. I added about a teaspoon of oregano, a healthy tablespoon of cumin, and a dried crushed habanero. If I weren’t adding beans with jalapenos and tomatoes with jalapenos, I’d've definitely added a healthy shake of crushed red pepper. This is very hot, so tone it back to your taste.

Add the broth, carrots, beans, and tomatoes. Bring to a boil and simmer until the aroma is irresistable. I didn’t have any avocado on hand though that would be a nice complement to the heat (as would a little dollop of plain yogurt or sour cream). Add some tortilla chips or warm corn tortilla strips if you like.

I’m going back to bed now.

Now, the first hints of changing maples on my commute are lovely, and the light chill in the morning while the dogs nose around in the damp goldenrod and poke is refreshing, but I gotta say that I hate that it’s dark by the time I get home from work.

On the other hand, longer dark and cooler temperatures mean more baking, soups, and richer dishes, so I look forward to that.

This curry is very quick to fix and works well for the ‘oh, I need to use up those vegetables’ days. I’m still working on approximating Cha Da Thai’s most excellent curries – this is close but I still have a way to go until I figure out how they get so much flavor in their green and panang curries.

Ingredients

3/4 – 1 cup Tempeh
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/4″ piece of ginger, chopped
1 green onion, sliced
1/2 to 1 cup vegetables of your choice (here we’ve got kale and green peppers chopped finely; eggplant is great, zucchini, bamboo shoots, carrots, whatever you have)
~1 tsp. green curry paste (this is Mae Ploy; I’ve used Thai Kitchen to good effect as well, though to my taste it’s hotter)
1/2 cup vegetable broth
4-5 tablespoons coconut milk
1 scant tsp brown sugar
salt to taste
couple tsp oil

Add the oil to a hot saucepan over medium heat and stir in the curry paste. Add the garlic, ginger, green onions, tempeh, and vegetables (if you’re using carrots or something sturdy, add that first).

Saute until the vegetables are just tender, and add the broth, coconut milk, and brown sugar. Add salt to your taste. I like this over rice.

This batch of Seitan was a plain gluten and water mixture, simmered in chicken-style flavorings of sage and thyme. Unfortunately I found out what happens when you allow seitan to boil – this batch came out much tougher than the earlier batch we’d made.

The sweet chile sauce was an experiment – mix a couple teaspoons of honey or other sweetener with a teaspoon of chile paste (we used the sambal paste here), a teaspoon of oil, and a chopped clove of garlic. That was still a bit too sweet for our taste, so I added some chopped ginger (later in the week we also added some bok choy). Fry these all together until the honey bubbles, and add some sliced seitan. The same sauce works well for chicken too.

Lentils are fabulously quick, so this was another pick for brown bagging.  These are plain green lentils, though red lentils would substitute just fine.

To start, rinse the lentils a few times and pick through to make sure there aren’t any rocks. I use the very scientific measurement of a cup of lentils and then water up to the first knuckle on my index finger.

Bring them to a boil:

When they reach a good boil, cover the pot, turn down the heat to very low, and simmer them until they absorb the water and are soft to the bite.

At this point, I let it cool a bit and then put half in the freezer and half in the refrigerator.

To make the curried lentils, we’ll need the lentils (that’s half of the one cup dry we started with) and

1/2 a small onion chopped
chopped ginger to taste (this is about a tablespoonful)
1 clove of garlic, chopped
carrots, chopped  (these tiny ones are from the carrot patch we should have thinned last month)
2-3 tablespoons coconut milk (We had some leftover coconut milk in the freezer – it keeps quite well this way if you don’t use all of a can.)
1 teaspoon green curry paste (ok, here, a generous knifetipful)

Saute the onions and carrots til the onions are a bit transparent, then add the garlic, curry paste, and ginger, and then the rest of the ingredients to the saucepan.

Bring this to a boil, and it’s ready to eat.

Note to self: See ‘what we learned in the first month’, especially the ‘plan ahead’ part. I love baking potatoes then mashing them for the nicer roasty taste, but hey, it’s already 9 pm; boiling will have to do.

I think this dish was originally made using cabbage, but I love kale in it.  I found this recipe on Steph’s excellent blog Wasabimon (when all else fails, cook) (go see, we’ll be here when you get back) and remembered that I hadn’t had it in forever. It’s also pretty quick to fix, especially if you have (erm…) planned ahead and have some baked potatoes ready to go. The guys have this as a side dish with a bit of kielbasa or bratwurst.

[Side note: Colcannon is also a splendid Celtic band out of Boulder, Colorado - keep an eye out for them as they travel; definitely worth a pint and a listen.]

Cut up your potatoes, and put them on to boil while you chop onions and garlic. Set those on to saute with a healthy dollop of butter or olive oil.

Chop your kale finely, and add it in with the garlic and onion mix. Isn’t this an awesomely fabulous emerald green?

When the potatoes are soft enough, add them to the kale and mash with a bit of milk.

Add salt and pepper to your taste, and enjoy.