Day 23: White Bean-Cauliflower Soup and Chard

I found a yummy-looking cauliflower & roasted garlic soup recipe at VeganDad's blog recently. However, I like to have more protein in my dinner, or I tend to wake up hungry in the middle of the night ... and heavy garlic is a definite trigger for my migraines ... and, well, isn't any dish really better with ginger?

So I made some navy beans and brown rice on my day off Monday, which leads me to...

Tip #2 for Easier Vegan(ish) Cooking
Plan your menu over the weekend, and prepare any needed
beans and rice ahead of time to save your weeknight hours.

Even though I was feeling all responsible and plan-ahead-y, I didn't think to soak the beans overnight. So I used the quick-soak method, and it worked great.

Here is the White Bean-Cauliflower Soup:

And the Swiss chard (on rice) that we had on the side:

The soup was mellow, but at the same time unbelievably rich and creamy. Tasting its smooth goodness for the first time, I had a hard time convincing myself it wasn't full of heavy cream. Also, it smelled uncannily like roast turkey when we reheated it the next day, and it tasted even better because the flavors had a chance to mix overnight. D and I both agreed so strongly that this smelled like turkey (and in that mouth-watering way, not in an, "isn't that weird???" way), that we thought it would be a good vegan Thanksgiving or Christmas soup. Molly even liked it!

The last time we bought chard, we got a not-so-good bunch that was just too bitter to eat - even though this is our go-to chard recipe, tested before with great success. I'm glad we tried it again, because it's restored our faith in chard. The juicy piquancy of it balanced out the soup well, and it, too, was better the next day.

One more off-topic comment before I type up these recipes: D's grandfather in Ireland ("Granda"), with whom he lived for three years in college, passed away yesterday morning. He had been extraordinarily healthy at the age of 88, and would have probably lived another decade if not for the infection that struck him about a month ago. My heart goes out to my husband and his mom, who are flying there tomorrow night. We will miss you, and I wish I could be there with you to help share the load.

Here are the recipes:

White Bean - Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients:
2 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 head cauliflower, cut into florets and then chopped coarsely
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
1/2 - 1 c. water or broth
3-5 cloves garlic*
About 2 c. cooked (1 c. dry) white beans (I used Goya Small White Beans, quick-soaked and cooked according to package instructions. Can be prepared a day or two ahead of time. I added 1 strip of kombu, and removed it when the beans were done.)
1/2 c. nutritional yeast
Unsweetened soy milk**
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400° F (~200°C).

Peel garlic cloves. Put them on a piece of aluminum foil, drizzle with a little olive oil, and fold the aluminum foil into a packet around them. Roast in oven 15-25 minutes, until soft and turning golden-brown.

While garlic is cooking, chop onion and celery and saute over medium heat in a large pot in olive oil. When onion is starting to brown, add cauliflower and ginger. Pour water or broth over cauliflower until the cauliflower is about half-submerged. Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer until cauliflower is very soft (about 10-15 minutes, depending on how small you cut it).

Add garlic, beans, and nutritional yeast. Stir over medium-high heat until entire mixture is very hot. (Remember, you'll be adding soy milk, which will cool it - so make it hot!) Remove from heat and blend thoroughly with an immersion (hand) blender. (You could do this in batches in a food processor or standard blender, but it will take longer.) When the entire mixture is creamy, add soy milk in small amounts and blend until it is at desired texture. (We made it pretty thick.)

Add salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to bowls and sprinkle cayenne pepper on top to taste. If desired, garnish with parsley. (We only had dried.)

*We used 3 cloves. The roasting mellows the garlic so much, though, that I think I'll try more next time. Unlike the recipe that inspired this recipe, this is not supposed to have a heavy garlic flavor - but I wish I could've tasted it just a little bit more.
**I use Silk Unsweetened. If you only have "Regular" (i.e., sweetened) soy milk, I'd recommend thinning with water instead.

Lemon-Pepper Swiss Chard

Ingredients:
2 bunches Swiss chard
2 T. vegan margarine
1 t. minced garlic (2 cloves)
1/4 t. dried crushed red pepper
1/4 c. lemon juice
White wine (optional)
Salt and pepper

Directions:
Wash chard. Trim stems and cut chard into 1/2-inch wide strips.

Melt margarine in a large stockpot over medium heat, stirring so it doesn't burn. Add garlic and crushed red pepper. Stir until garlic is starting to brown. Add chard; stir to coat. Turn heat to medium-low, cover pot, and cook 8-10 minutes, until chard reaches desired consistency (we like it really soft.) Remove from heat. Stir in lemon juice and, if desired, a splash of white wine. Season with salt and pepper.

Day 11: Red Bean Hummus, Lentil Soup, and Collard Greens

Sunday is becoming my cooking day. Today I made Szechuan-marinated baked tofu and tempeh for this week's lunches (no picture included; it's pretty boring-looking), plus...

Red Bean Hummus
and...

Moroccan Lentil Soup
AND...

Chipotle Collard Greens

Scroll to the bottom of this post for the Red Bean Hummus recipe, made with Azuki / Adzuki / Aduki beans (the spelling varies, as it's transliterated from the Japanese characters.)

The amazing collard green recipe is from the Homesick Texan, one of my favorite food blogs. Even though I no longer can eat most of the stuff on this blog, her blog is still worth reading for the wonderful stories and the amazing food photography. For those of you who love your greens with lots of ham and/or bacon, give these a try. The smoky chipotle peppers made me not even miss the meat, and the strange-seeming addition of peanut butter did not make them taste very peanut-y, but did give the sauce such a nice, smooth mouthfeel that I had to put it on rice just to soak up as much of the goodness as I could! This was a team effort, and was one of both my and D's favorite dishes we've made so far.

The Moroccan lentil soup is a recipe from The Crockpot Lady, a very cool blogger introduced to me by my sister, C.Beth. The Crockpot Lady spent all of 2008 using her slow cooker every single day. Many of her recipes are vegetarian or vegan, and almost all are gluten free (she has a child with celiac disease.) I changed the recipe a little -- blackeye peas instead of pinto beans, no chickpeas, and 3 cups of broth instead of 4. The soup sat for about 9 hours, and it was so flavorful. I made it with less cayenne pepper than the recipe called for, so Molly could eat it -- and she gobbled it up. It still had a little bit of spice, but she had her milk, so she was fine.

On Friday, we went to the Japanese restaurant around the corner for a mostly-macrobiotic (but not at all vegan) meal. We already go there often, and it'll probably be a weekly treat for us on this new diet. $23 at this place gets you a meal for two, including salad, miso soup, a good-sized sashimi platter, veggie and shrimp tempura, rice, and ice cream. We said no to the ice cream, so the only non-macro thing on the menu was the white rice (which Molly eats far more of than I do). It's a nice treat, especially when you add on edamame and a spicy tuna roll like we did, and super-cheap!

Saturday was D's dad's birthday party, at a pizza joint called Flatbread in Portsmouth, NH. They use all organic ingredients, and they try to buy local - although they aren't able to do it for many of their ingredients this time of year. We ordered their vegan pizza (it's not on the website, but is on their normal menu), with tomato sauce, caramelized onions, garlic oil, olives, and mushrooms. It was so flavorful that I didn't even miss the cheese! Any New Englanders out there really need to try this place. I did, however, have half a cupcake for dessert. If there's any time to cheat, it's at a birthday party.

And, finally, the promised recipe: Red Bean Hummus. A bit of background first, though. Adzuki beans are the beans behind the red bean ice cream and other red bean-paste desserts you find in Asian shops and restaurants. They are not sweet, but are often put into sweet recipes. This was my first time making them. I think they taste more like pinto beans than any other type, although they look like miniature kidney beans. They're about the size of lentils and, like lentils, do not have to be soaked. I put this recipe together, using the hummus recipe from Vegan Spoonful as my inspiration. The flavor is a little different from regular hummus, and a nice change.

Red Bean Hummus

Ingredients:
1 1/2 c. dry adzuki (azuki, aduki) beans
1 strip kombu seaweed (optional, but will help tenderize, flavor, and de-gassify the beans)
6 c. water

1/2 c. tahini (sesame paste)
4-6 T. lemon juice
2 T. lime juice
2 cloves garlic
1 T. ground cumin
3 T. olive oil, plus more for drizzling
salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper to taste
cilantro to garnish (optional)

Directions:
Add the beans, kombu, and 3 c. of water to a pot. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Remove from burner, add the other 3 c. cold water, and bring to a boil again. Simmer for 1 hour, or until beans are tender.

If desired, remove kombu (I didn't - it blends in well, and the flavor is very mild after it's been boiling for an hour and a half.) Drain beans and pour into a food processor or mixing bowl. Add all other ingredients and pulse, either with the food processor or with an immersion (hand) blender. (A regular blender will work too, but you'll probably have to do it in small batches.) If it's too thick, you can add a little bit of water. These beans are not as dry as garbanzo beans.

When finished, transfer to a serving bowl. Drizzle olive oil on top and garnish with fresh-ground pepper and cilantro.

Eat with whole-wheat pita (baked into chips or not), fresh veggies, etc ... or it makes a great sandwich spread!

Day 4: Shopping and Stew

We did a big shopping trip the day before yesterday - a little Asian store near our house (we're lucky to live in a big Asian neighborhood, because many ingredients in macrobiotic recipes are Asian ones that are more obscure to most Westerners), Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. We bought a ton of stuff to stock our cupboards, including millet, hulled barley, dried garbanzo and adzuki beans, tahini, tempeh, tofu (super-cheap at the Asian store, and made right down the street from the school where I teach), wakame and kombu seaweed, miso, tamari, brown rice syrup, brown rice vinegar, dried mushrooms, nutritional yeast, quinoa,...

This was my first time ever of buying 12 out of the above 16 ingredients, although I had tried all but the brown rice syrup and nutritional yeast. I had bought tofu, dried mushrooms, quinoa, and tahini in the past. It was all a little pricey when added together ... but many of the ingredients will last a long time in the fridge or pantry.

A small sample from our trip:

Yesterday afternoon, I made hummus from the wonderful recipe at The Vegan Spoonful blog. I've made hummus before, but never from chickpeas that I cooked myself. I don't know why I've always been so afraid to cook beans (rather than buying them in a can) - it was simple, but it does require soaking overnight, so not good for a last-minute dish. I added kombu to the soaking and cooking water (a type of kelp - I had no idea there were so many varieties of seaweed out there), which helps tenderize the beans and prevent their more ... pungent side effects.

I didn't take a picture of the hummus. It turned out really pretty, with coarse-ground pepper, a few chickpeas, and a swirl of olive oil on top. And then I took one of the homemade pita chips I'd thrown together in 10 minutes and ruined the pretty picture. So click over to the recipe to see how the hummus is supposed to look! It was really, really good. Molly LOVES it. She eats it with a spoon. She calls it "Thomas" instead of "hummus." ("More Thomas, please, Mama!")

Finally, for dinner, we put some of our new ingredients to work on Barley Mushroom Soup from The Self Healing Cookbook. I don't want to put the recipe in this post, because it's copyrighted and I didn't really adapt it enough to call it my own. But basically, it's a kombu-and-mushroom broth with barley, sesame oil, onion, garlic, carrot, celery, bay leaf, dill, cabbage and miso all added in at various points. It was really, really, really good. Thick, somehow creamy (without any "creamy" ingredients), and surprisingly filling! It was even better tonight when we had it for leftovers.

Here is a picture (I looked at my camera manual and am getting slowly better at food photography):

I've done more cooking, too - marinated and slow-baked tempeh and tofu for lunch today, with enough extra to bring during the week, and quinoa pilaf to bring for lunch. Maybe more on that stuff later, but leave a comment if you're interested in the recipes (or search around my delicious.com page, under the "vegan" label).

Needless to say, I'm enjoying the adventure!

P.S. I have mentioned tempeh several times, without ever explaining what it is. It is sort of a cultured soybean cake, with other whole grains added in. The one I used today had millet, barley, and brown rice in it. It has a really good texture and is a great meat alternative (one that doesn't add all kinds of unpronounceable stuff to make it taste like meat - it doesn't taste like meat, it tastes like tempeh. And that's good!) It can be sliced or crumbled. Tempeh is cultured, just as yogurt and many cheeses are cultured. Here's a good picture - you can see what a complex texture it has.