Vegan Minestrone

Minestrone can be anything you want it to be.  It's super flexible, adapting to what's in season.  In the summer, your minestrone can be full of zucchini and fresh tomato and herbs, and in colder months minestrone can be a refuge from thick, pureed vegetable soups while still providing an outlet for the squash, potatoes and hearty greens of winter. 

Minestrone can easily be made vegetarian or vegan.  Many recipes call for pancetta or beef both, but a dab of extra oil and a bit of sundried tomato can fill in for the rich flavor and texture provided by the meat.  If you don't use butter and don't sprinkle the top with parmesan, it's a vegan soup.  If you leave out the pasta, it's gluten-free.  Minestrone is what you need it to be.

The recipe below is an amalgam of all the recipes out there, skewed towards what was in my fridge on Sunday.  Yes, this was superbowl minestrone.  It's vegan, and while I threw some pasta into mine at the last minute, it's portioned to result in a rich soup with plenty of chunky vegetables and beans and no need for pasta.  (Though, if you'd like to add pasta, just add more stock). 

Sunday Dinner and Using up the Veg

This is pretty and delicious, but it's all supermarket foods, no CSA foods. 

Whenever we've been in the market for a CSA, and that's been a few times now, we have The Conversation.  The Does-It-Really-Make-Sense-To-Get-A-Full-Share conversation.  And when people ask me about my CSA, they're often surprised that we get a full share.  Most of my friends in two-person households get a half.  A half share means, depending on your CSA, either that you pick up a full haul every two weeks, or that you get a lesser haul weekly.  The every two weeks thing wouldn't work for us; I like having lettuce, always, and lettuce doesn't keep like that.  Neither does the rest of it.  

Spring Pasta Salad with Balsamic-Yogurt Dressing

As I was putting lunch together today, Sous Chef Brian said, "This'll be a great post celebrating the new spring veg!" And I thought, yeah, if every other post hadn't already been that.  I mean, new spring veg are VERY exciting, but really, there's a limit.  Plus, I've failed on the veg a bit - I got those gorgeous peas in our first CSA haul and I thought I'd use them in this dish, but they didn't make it.  Turns out peas are "urgent" and you should pretty much just eat them as soon as they show up. 


But it's still exciting, since these are my first tomatoes of the year and we've eaten them in everything over the past few days, and while asparagus and radishes aren't brand new, they're still a welcome treat, so yay, spring veg!  


This is pasta salad, so of course, you can make it with whatever you get at your local market that week, it doesn't need to follow a recipe.  I used yogurt to make the dressing creamier and pretty much relied on the veg themselves for flavor, with a bit of cheese and some basil. 

Creamy Roasted Garlic Spinach Pasta

It's April, it's distinctly spring, and new veggies are on the horizon, but for most of the winter, there's been a lot of spinach in my life.  Year-round there's a lot of spinach in my life, but there has been less variety lately, so spinach is at the forefront.

This is one of those dishes where you can very easily swap in and out whatever appeals to you or whatever is left in your fridge and it'll still taste like you put way more time and effort into it than you did.

Vaguely Italian Couscous with Artichokes and Dried Tomatoes

It's weird how little I talk about couscous.  Couscous means quick, easy, vegetarian dinner here.  So we were having one of those nights where you sit on the couch and go back and forth with, "I don't know, what do you want to eat?" And I listed off ingredients we had handy and Sous Chef Brian was like, "Couscous!  With artichokes! And spinach!"  All irritatingly enthusiastic, and I was like, "Ok, with sundried tomatoes?" And he was like, "Yeah!" All irritatingly enthusiastic.   And ten minutes later, we had dinner.  Couscous is what we do around here when we're dangerously close to saying, "There's nothing to eat."  Are there veg in the freezer?  Is there couscous?  There's dinner. 

Turn your regular pasta sauce into vodka sauce

There's a whole debate over whether vodka sauce is really a food, or if it's a 1980's food trend that refuses to die.   Chowhound has some decent conversation on the topic, and folks land on both the "vodka makes tomatoes taste better" side and the "this isn't really food" side.  More than 10 years ago, NYT said it was food, but that might have been too close to the 80s.  If you were to Google it, you'd find additional sources on the debate.

I think it's food.  But since I wasn't all that aware of what was food before the 80s, what do I know?  I make cream sauces without vodka, and they're good, but in my silly little opinion, vodka sauces get you to the magical place of pepperyness balanced with sweetness, and I don't think a sweet cream sauce with some pepper in it does that as well.  

Pasta with Broccoli and White Wine Sauce

When it's cold out, I want food with rich sauces.  Two weeks ago I said I wanted lasagna or beef stew or something like that and ended up pretty happy with barbecue seitan.  This was like that.  I wanted mac and cheese or pasta with meat sauce or ... mmm ... white wine sauce.

I don't think you're going to dig through your pantry and pull out the same experimental spelt noodles I used, and I don't think you're going to have one inappropriate mushroom to add to the dish either.  But you can do this with what's in your fridge.  Let's focus on the wine sauce and leave the rest aside for now.

Whole Wheat Ravioli with Roasted Vegetables and Ricotta

 

It's half whole wheat and half AP flour, stuffed with roasted vegetables and some ricotta.  There's just something about roasted veg, the nutty sweetness, that works so well with whole wheat pasta.  This isn't a recipe, per se, since you'll use whatever roasted veg you have on hand.  It's more of a story of how I made ravioli for the first time, and how you can do it too. 

Local Pasta from the Big Chain Store

Ok, so I didn't really cook.   Our Whole Foods recently started selling fresh local pasta*.  A couple of weeks back we tried some ravioli, which was awesome but expensive.  I compare everything to the price of meat,** and this was like if we had shared a free range, boneless, skinless chicken breast.  But again, awesome.  So then we went back to try the cheaper unfilled pasta. 

It comes in sheets and they cut it there, so I was like, "Can I get two people's worth of something like a fettucini?" And the teenager working the booth was like, "I don't know it by name, I know it by size."  Uh... so fettucini sized?  I pointed to one of the example pastas and he cut the spinach sheet into these ribbons.

I don't get exposed to much fresh pasta.  I threaten to learn to make pasta, but don't follow through.   It was incredible.  Really tender without being soft, and it cooked quickly.  This spinach pasta tasted way more spinachy than dried, too.  


It cost us just under a buck a serving (we asked for two people's worth - because I have no idea - and got three meals out of it).  So for the cost of a box of decent dried pasta, we got three meals of incredible pasta. So, in terms of spaghetti, way more expensive, but in terms of dinner, cheap as hell.  


I dressed it up a bit with leftover basil cream sauce and some parmesan.  With a salad, it made a great meal.


*I'm not so much saying, "Run out to Whole Foods and buy this," as much as I'm saying, "get your hands on some fresh pasta."


**ok, not everything, just foods.  Can you imagine?  "I want to buy this shirt - let's see, it's the cost of 4 pounds of ground chuck..."

Slow Roasted Tomato Sauce

I had a lot of tomatoes.  Not like, a lot of tomatoes, but several.  Enough that I needed to take action before they went to waste, but not so many that I wanted to blanch and seed them and spend serious time fussing over them.  I had like a pound and half of all sorts of tomatoes.  

I also had time.  We had a bit of a storm here, you may have heard, and had prepared to not have power or water on Sunday.  But we had power and water, and I had done all of the laundry and cleaned out the fridge and everything in advance of the storm so once it passed, I had nothing but time.  

Slow roasted tomato time. 

Basic Tomato Sauce

A few weeks ago I got all those tomatoes, remember?  I had seeded and drained them and hidden them away in freezer bags.   So it was time to make sauce.  A while back I made my "winter sauce" from canned tomatoes, and this is what I do in the summer with real ones. 

Orange Seitan and Noodle Stir Fry

This is one of those things that happens in my kitchen on a weeknight when plans have gone out the window.  I make a list of things I'm going to cook for the week,but then the milk goes bad or I forget to marinate the whatever.  

We needed to use up the last two side servings of that slaw I made, wanted something hot and protein-y and dinner-ish with it. 

Find some veg.  

Caprese Pasta Salad

Dude, it's hot.   I mean, really.


But it's basil time, and tomato time.  Time to send Sous Chef Brian to three stores to find good mozzarella.  


So this is less, "whoa, here's a recipe for a thing I've never made," or "that's an innovative approach to..." and more, "oh yeah, that one had slipped my mind."


Because who can think?  It's hot. 


4 ounces pasta, boiled, rinsed, cooled.


15 basil leaves, rough chopped.


3/4 pint of cherry tomatoes, sliced.


1 tiny red onion, minced.


2 tablespoons balsamic


1 tablespoon olive oil.


Fresh mozzarella, little balls torn in half.


Pinch of salt.


Three pinches of fresh ground black pepper. 


30 minutes in the fridge. 


Dinner. And Lunch.

Garlic Scape Pesto Chicken Pasta

Yeah, the title of this one is just a bunch of food words strung together.  I could have used the word tomato too, but I thought that would be pushing it.

I made a ton of garlic scape pesto a few days ago.  I mixed it with red wine vinegar and a bit of oil and called it salad dressing for lunch, and then heated it up with my pasta and chicken and called it sauce for dinner.  

Pasta Salad with Shallot and Parmesan Dressing

Thanks for the suggestions on how to use the farmshare veg.   I had a suggestion here for scape wontons(!!) and a scape cheeseball, and on Facebook I got a recommendation for scape pesto (of course) and a lesson on how scallions work.   It's in the high 90s these days and heading to 100 today, which is upsetting, and so per my half-joking plan of making this a week of pasta salads and salad salads, I started with pasta salad. 

Pasta salad, like pizza, egg rolls, omelets, is a great place for whatever you've got.  I don't think I ever make two that are exactly the same, and so I don't expect anyone to follow this like a recipe.  That's not how pasta salad works, at least for me.  I'll post the dressing recipe. But put things in your pasta salad like what I put in this one, and it'll be like this one.  

Cashew and Broccoli Mac and Cheese

I've been thinking about mac and cheese since it came up in a conversation about meatloaf, which I'm not really into.  Also, my favorite person who I'm not married to recently pointed out this recipe for mac and cheese, which includes pureed veg. 

I've also been thinking about ways to use cashew cream ever since we had such spectacular success with cashew cream-based vodka sauce.  But I'm not one to use fake cheese, and there are tons of recipes out there for vegan mac and cheeze, which seems sacrilegious, so what's the point of using cashew cream if I'm still going to use real cheese?

A couple of things, really.  If I'm saving on using real cream (and skim milk is just too runny) AND I can avoid making a roux to start the sauce, then I'm saving both cream and butter from the dish, and if you're as interested in cheese as we are, it makes sense to cut cholesterol where you can, especially where you don't feel it.   We should all probably eat less dairy anyhow.  I went through a bit of a nutritional analysis of cashew cream versus cow cream here, so I won't repeat the details, but 1. we like cashew cream and 2.  it's better for us.  Did I mention we're using a lot of cheese here?

Chicken and Green Beans in Italian Dressing - Revisited

This was a staple in my house growing up.   Sous Chef Brian's house too.   We both grew up with similar genres of food, but they were different.  His mom would put ground beef into Kraft Mac and Cheese, and my mom would put muenster and teriyaki sauce on steak.  But they both would cook chicken breasts in a bottle of Italian dressing, and serve it with green beans over rice. 


I guess because we both were so familiar with it - and I'm not trying to detract from it, we both really liked it, this was a staple in the early days of eating together.   When we were first living in a house with a dozen other people out in the woods, I'd make the foods I grew up with and the foods he grew up with, and cakes.   Terrible, brightly-colored, boxed and frosted cakes.   One roommate once said to me, "I didn't realize you liked dessert so much," and I didn't - I just thought that that's what I was supposed to do.  Make cakes.   There was a lot of meatloaf back then.   Sous Chef Brian misses the meatloaf. 


So the other day, we were doing some menu planning and Sous Chef Brian said, "How about chicken in Italian dressing," and I got all self-righteous and horrified for a second, and then I realized it could be awesome. 

Chunky Vegan Vodka Sauce

This is exciting. You should make this and eat it.   You should not tell people (non-vegan people) that it's vegan until after they're wow-ing about it.  

I was apprehensive about trying to do a non-dairy cream sauce.  I'm trying to expand my repertoire of vegan recipes, not because I'll ever go cheese-free, but because you never know who you're going to end up cooking for.  Actually, I do know, one of the friends I cook for (used to cook more for, got lazy, I suck) is vegetarian and dairy free, and frankly, eggs aren't exciting enough to me to call her anything but vegan.  So I like to try different things and see if we can get by without milk.  But this dish isn't about getting by, this dish rocks and I don't see a reason to make dairy cream sauce again.  

Anyhow, back to my apprehension.  1.  I like cheese and stuff and 2.  I tried to use the cashew cream a couple of days ago and it's was disgusting.  I mean like, spit-it-out-and-try-to-forget-it-ever-happened disgusting.  But maybe that's because I tried to use it raw in a cold sauce, in lieu of sour cream, because this time, again, fantastic. 

Spaghetti and Bison Meatballs and Italian Bread

Spaghetti and meatballs.   Something about it sounds so just thrown together.  Like a weeknight meal you wouldn't make for company.   But it was Sunday, and we had a dinner guest.   Oh, I should tell you - I asked her, "Hey, since I reference you in all my Sunday posts, is it cool if I use your name on the Interwebs?"  And she's all, "Yeah, I mean, that's fine and all, but it'd be more fun if you kept me a mystery."  So we had our mysterious dinner guest on Sunday, and made spaghetti and meatballs.   It was time intensive, making sauce, meatballs, bread, and totally worth it, even if in the end, it was just spaghetti and meatballs. 

Butternut Squash, Chard and Sage Lasagna Rolls

I committed to doing some cooking in advance this weekend.  Cooking for lunches during the week, cooking for the freezer for some night when I feel less like cooking, cooking for the sake of cooking.  There's just two of us, and so making up a pot of/pan of anything means there are going to be leftovers, and I'm not one to eat the same thing more than a few times in a week.   So when I make something that takes more than a weeknight's worth of effort, I cook up a full pan of whatever it is, reserve two servings and freeze the rest.  Then our lunches this week can be something we haven't eaten in several weeks, rather than whatever we ate last night.  

This is a particularly effective policy for something rich, like a butternut squash lasagna enrobed in buttery sauce. 

This is one of few things I do with butternut squash.  I generally don't like sweet entrees.  I refuse to put brown sugar on sweet potatoes.  Carrots are an ingredient, not a dish on their own.  You get it.  So the squash gets balanced out by the cheese and the sage and the chard and it doesn't overpower the dish with sweet.