VeganMoFo Day 18 ~ C-C-C-CSA week 43, 2012

Lots of C’s in this week’s CSA haul. Elstars, leek and salad greens rich with vitamin C, and carrots, corn salad and cilantro starting with it… No-one’s laughing, I know. ;)

• Carrots
• Cilantro
• Corn salad
• Leek
• Elstar apples
• Fennel

My fridge is pretty full with open tins, leftovers and even more vegetables, so here’s my plan to use up as much as possible.

Menuplan Friday October 26th  – Tuesday 30th

• Noodles with leftover takeaway garlic tofu from Soy with additional vegetables (carrot, leek, yellow pepper, borlotti beans) and mushrooms. [Friday]
• Pea soup (freezer stash), pasta salad with leftover avocado pesto and sun-dried tomatoes, Caesar salad (dressing from La Dolce Vegan! p.93), bread and dip. [Saturday – DEXTER DATE]
• Leek & potato soup with cilantro (La Dolce Vegan! p.109), tasty tempeh chili for NVV-forum La Dolce Vegan! cookbook challenge (p.163) and bread.
• Potato salad with avocado pesto, balsamic vinegar, onion and sun-dried tomatoes, coconut-carrot soup with cilantro (La Dolce Vegan! p.112 half recipe).
• Fennel salad with tomato, basil and olives, roasted sweet dumpling pumpkins stuffed with Gyro seitan from my new Terry Hope Romero cookbook Vegan Eats World (p.54 & 253), leftover dill sauce.

Last night I went to the Terry Hope Romero cooking demo, Q&A and book presentation of Vegan Eats World (more about that soon). We got to taste the gyro seitan with creamy cashew sauce and a banana-chocolate ‘cheesecake’. Both were awesome so I bought the book and put the seitan on the menu right away! It’s my first time making seitan, so fingers crossed…

Advertentie

VeganMoFo Day 9 ~ What’s On The Menu?

I had to play truant for a couple of days, but now I’m back at VeganMoFo with my traditional CSA (b)log post and menu plan.

• Red, yellow & chioggia beets
• Silver beet
• Lollo Bionda lettuce
• Hokkaido pumpkin
• Doyenné pears
• Parsley

I still got last week’s runner beans and will be getting cauliflower and purple kale tomorrow from another local organic garden. So what’s up this week?

Menuplan Thursday October 11th  – Wednesday 17th

• Thursday: homemade tomato soup, leftover pasta with pesto, and leftover saag with chickpeas made into a pasta sauce with mushrooms, leek and baked onions.
• Friday: rice with chili (freezer stash), avocado, home-made salsa picante and steamed silver beet.
  Baking pumpkin crumb cake with pecan streusel from Veganomicon (p.255) for my friend Loes’ birthday. Will adapt the streusel to a nut mix as I don’t have enough pecans.
• Saturday: Turkish beans (taze fasulye), carrot-walnut salad with soygurt dressing (cevizli havuç salatasi) adapted from Lokanta cookbook and pide bread or a grain dish.
• A variation of The Green Cuisine’s pumpkin-paprika soup -another VeganMoFo inspired dish!- and beet-potato salad
• Baked potatoes, veggiedogs and sautéed silverbeet with creamy cauliflower ‘queso’ from Cadry’s Kitchen.
• Quesadillas with leftover cauliflower ‘queso’; autumn salad with beetroot and baked pear/apple adapted from Baking Made Easy.
• Dessert: sugared puff pastry with pear and chocolate syrup.
• Snack: kale chips (or this VeganMoFo spicy kale recipe from The Green Cuisine).
• Sandwich spread: eggless salad with last week’s celery. Recipe recommendations really MUCH appreciated!

Planning Ahead (organic CSA vegetables week 39, 2012)

I’ve got a busy week coming up with the start of VeganMoFo on October 1st. I haven’t been able to blog much lately and now I’m supposed to post daily and share the wonders of eating without animal products for a whole Vegan Month of Food! But more about that later.

As usual I’ve planned my meals for the next few days so that I won’t have to think about that any more, nor run to the shops at the very last minute. Every little bit helps in finding time and peace to participate in the blogfest!

Now here’s our veggie haul.

• Red Batavia lettuce
• Leek
• Santana apples (hypo-allergenic)
• Rucola (rocket)
• Corn cob
• Patisson pumpkin
• Fennel

Other stuff in/around my fridge: carrots, chickpeas, roasted paprika, cauliflower, coconut milk, pumpkin & butternut squash, zucchini, cabbage, mushrooms, cilantro and some leftovers.

So here’s the menu.

Menu plan 28 September – 3 October

• Lettuce soup, leftovers lentil-beetroot salad and Greek chickpea salad, bakeoff bread [Friday]
  
  
• Seitan stroganoff, minty bulgar with leek (A vegan taste of Greece p.76) or Oven-braised potatoes and leek (p.67) [Saturday]
  
• Dal Tarka with cauliflower (possibly peas) but without sweet potato, roasted butternut squash with coriander seeds (Veganomicon p.112), basmati rice and (prefab) papadums. Maybe some mint dip [Sunday]
  
  
• Patisson soup and casserole with potato mash, leftover sautéed cabbage & roasted pepper, blue ‘sheese’ and a nutty crumble on top [Monday]
  
  
• Something improvised from the pantry, leftovers, takeaway – what ever’s easy [Tuesday]
• Stuffed courgette, fennel-avocado salad (A vegan taste of Greece p.89), bakeoff bread [Wednesday]
• Sometime during the week I also hope to make some roasted pepper houmous.

You’re welcome at our table if you see anything you like! :)

I edited last week’s menu with photos of my meals.

Fall Greens (CSA vegetables weeks 43 and 44, 2011)

I’ve got a lot of vegetables left over in my fridge, so it’s time for some serious menu planning!

Amelishof CSA vegetables week 43

Last week’s veggies:

• red Batavian lettuce
• cilantro
• pointed paprika
• (Batavian) endive
• leek
• celery

Amelishof CSA vegetables week 44

This week’s greens:

• pumpkin
• lollo bionda lettuce
• Elstar apples
• parsley
• kohlrabi
• green beans

Menu plan Wednesday November 2nd – Tuesday 8th

You’ll even find vegetables on the menu from my CSA loot further back!

• Wednesday: eating out with birthday boy @variomatic in Hotel de Goudfazant (Amsterdam)
• Thursday (Mr Gnoe’s piano night): leek-fennel soup (veganized version of Vega Gerechten p.134) & veggie dog with greens
• Friday: spicy sweet potato soup, chili con ‘carne’ tacos and fennel-orange salad with black olives (Vega Gerechten p.150 & 179)
• Saturday: Indonesian dinner! Osèng-osèng kohlrabi, sambal goreng tofu & green beans with white rice (Vegetarisch Indonesisch Kookboek p.50 & 94)
• Sunday (Dexter-5 Night with Elsje): garlic-Jerusalem artichoke soup, garlic or rosemary bread from Vlaams Broodhuys, 2 types of hummus (red beet & pumpkin), cooking pears and red beet salad with walnuts and balsamico (Vega Gerechten p.81, 61 & 188)
• Monday: Ethiopian lentil dish (cutting from Leven, lente 2011) with ‘faux sour creme‘ (La Dolce Vegan!), pita bread and kohlrabi salad (Groentegerechten p.32) OR Indonesian leftovers with nasi goreng
• Tuesday: eating @ mother-in-law’s

ExtraVeganza! Day 8 ~ Hearty Soup Anyone?

Menu Day 8 (February 3rd)

Breakfast
For breakfast I had oatmeal gruel with almond milk.
I had almost made some beschuitpap (rusk porridge) because almond milk seemed to go well with it, but when I checked the label I noticed there’s egg in these biscuits. *SIGH*
It is unbelievable how many foods contain animal products! So I changed to oatmeal — and I’m glad I did! Boy, it was good. Probably even better than with cow’s milk! (LOL that’s a lot of exclamation marks in a row! ;) The gruel was creamy and a little sweet thanks to the milk’s 1%  of agave syrup, so I didn’t need to add any sweetener like I usually do. So another great discovery today! *HAPPY DANCE*

BTW I always add ground flax seeds to oatmeal, to insure a sufficient intake of omega-3. After breakfast I had some green kukicha tea.

Lunch
At midday I had 3 whole wheat sunflower seed sammies and drank some San Pellegrino with lemon juice. I concluded with a (decaf) latte. Here’s what I put on my sandwiches:

• last night’s leftovers: falafel, salad & spicy sauce,
• avocado & radish on veganaise with basil and African Peper mix,
• smoked sesame & almond tofu with spring onions and toasted sesame seeds on ketchup.

Dinner
Thursday night, soup night. Mr Gnoe has piano lessons to go to. The meal I prepared helped clearing out the fridge. I used up half a pumpkin, a lonely chilli pepper and an open container of coconut milk to make pumpkin-coconut soup. From a wilting apple, open can of pineapple, green onion, red and white cabbage I mixed up a salad with curry-ginger dressing. We enjoyed it with the last bit of Monday’s pizza and some baguette. It was all very nice and so easy to make!

Snacks
Gnoe ate nothing in between meals today..!

Experiences

Anything special about today?

I’m so happy with today’s discovery of Isola Bio almond milk! It’s even good to drink straight from the glass. :) I’m not sure whether it’s always the same, but the type I bought is actually rice milk blended with almond paste. When I took my first sip there was a slight hint of that ‘dusty’ rice taste, but I didn’t notice it afterwards.

This is exactly what I had hoped to achieve in ExtraVeganza!: trying out many different products to find the perfect ones. Even Mr Gnoe said so yesterday. He is not too fond of ontbijtkoek but when he cut off a slice for my breakfast he noticed it smelled so good! :)

Today also proved that the sunflower seed bread I discovered on Tuesday holds up well after it has been frozen. Yay! Now I just need to look if the organic store closer to home also sells this Flemish bread.

Any difficulties?

None whatsoever.

Pumpkin-Coconut Soup

I used a Dutch on-line recipe to make this heartwarming pumpkin soup. It’s officially a starter but it came out pretty thick and served well as a main course. That might be the result of the fact that I added a sweet potato the recipe didn’t call for, but on the other hand I had only half a pumpkin. Anyway, you can choose to dilute it by adding more broth. Here’s 10 steps to comfort food!

Ingredients

Serves 4.

• 1 small orange pumpkin (washed)
• optional: 1 sweet potato
• 1/2 stalk lemon grass; washed (I always put fresh Asian herbs into the freezer in portions ready to use)
• 30 gram ginger (I had only about 15 grams left)
• 1 red chilli pepper; cleaned and seeds removed
• 1 tbs oil (sunflower)
• 350 ml vegetable broth
• 400 ml coconut milk
• salt & pepper
• 2 tbs pumpkin seeds

Preparation

1. Cut the pumpkin in half, remove seeds and chop up the meat.
2. Peel potato and cut into small dices.
3. Chop up lemon grass.
4. Peel ginger and chop finely.
5. Chop chilli pepper.
6. Heat oil and fry all the chopped up ingredients for a few minutes.
7. Add broth and coconut milk, bring to a boil and let cook for 15 minutes.
8. Toast the pumpkin seeds in the meantime.
9. Mash up soup using blender.
10. Serve sprinkled with pumpkin seeds.

Enjoy!

– – – – –

New recipe(s) tried for the Whip Up Something New! Challenge!

The Last (CSA vegetables week 51, 2010)

Our third season of CSA has come to a closing. Now we’ll need to decide on which veggies to buy all by ourselves again… Not an easy task! #lazybums

• purslane
• leek
• thyme
• red cabbage
• choggia beets
• apples
• variety of onions: shallot, red and white

When I got beets last time I made Nigel Slater’s Beetroot Seeds Cake and it was goooood!

Clicking on the picture will bring you to Flickr, where I’ve put up the link to the on-line recipe and some adaptations I made.

Yesterday was another Meatless Monday (Plantaardig Maandag) and supposed to be December’s #twitterfoodparty about squash, so I made a vegan Indian curry with basmati rice and (prefab) mango chutney with last week’s hokkaido pumpkin. The picture didn’t turn out too great but it tasted better than it looks. ;) Anyway, the food party got postponed due to too many ‘twabsentees‘…! If you want to join in, just make something with squash on January 10th, use the hashtag and tweet a picture!

So, no more CSA (b)log posts until the first week of May 2011. Some of you might think that a good thing… But hopefully not all???

The End is Nigh

We’re halfway December and the end of our CSA season is nearing. Next week’s bag will be The Last!

But you haven’t even had a chance to enjoy any of this month’s organic vegetables… So, here are my veggies of weeks 48, 49 and (freshly picked up today) 50.

Amelishof organic vegetables week 48, 2010

• leek
• kale
• capsicum
• corn salad
• red beet (waiting for me to make Nigel Slater’s red beet cake…)
• pumpkin

Amelishof organic vegetables week 49, 2010

• brussels sprouts (on the stalk, just for fun!)
• parsnip
• corn lettuce
• kohlrabi
• onions (red & white)
• Elstar apples

Amelishof organic vegetables week 50, 2010

WOW, what a mega bag of vegetables we got today! Remember the Invasion of the Broad-Leaved Endive Heads? This time there were even more! It makes a nice green background for the rest of the veggies ;) And Ringo totally went for it… Crazy cat :)

• kale
• endive
• carrots (not washed, so they’ll keep longer)
• root parsley (on the left of my pile of carrots, hiding behind the…)
• kabocha pumpkin!
• celeriac
• cooking pears
• Jerusalem artichoke

I’m not planning our menus and we’ve been eating out, visiting relatives et cetera so next to this HUGE new batch we still have some veggies of the previous weeks to use up: beetroot — but like I said; I’ve got great plans for that ;) — parsnip, kohlrabi, leek and 1 small pie pumpkin. Maybe I would be wise start planning again ;)

Say, Elsje: if you see anything you’d like to use for our 24 mini-marathon dinner next Friday, just give a shout!

Invasion of the Endive Heads

This week’s organic vegetable packet did not bring us one, not two, but THREE heads of endive!

Wow. I guess it’s obvious what we’ll be eating this week… ;)

• lollo rossa lettuce
• pumpkins
• endive
• topinamburs
• fennel
• Elstar apples

I considered changing plans and serve yesterday’s guests potato mash with endive for dinner instead of the planned hutspot but decided against it: the idea of cooking the dish I hated so much as a child was way more exciting! Up until this week I have never, ever made it myself. So it felt like a real challenge to try this new recipe.

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: I liked it! We caramelized some onions and toasted some pecan nuts for topping, and had vegetarian ‘meatballs’ and fennel-tomato salad as side dishes. (*) There’s just one BUT.. If I’m completely honest I wouldn’t really call this dish hotchpotch: the carrot and potatoes aren’t mashed together — it’s just a mix of cut up parsnip, potatoes and carrot, like my oven-roasted root vegetable dish with honey. I even used honey instead of the required maple syrup since my cupboard lacked the latter. So I’ll need to re-challenge myself another time ;)

Do you have a dish you hated when you were young and still won’t eat today?

(*) Side note for Dutch readers wanting to make the hutspot recipe: it took the vegetables 45 minutes at 200 °C (gas oven: 5) instead of 30 to get done.

Hello, it’s Halloween!

Actually very few people in Holland celebrate Halloween (we’ve got our own festival for children called Sint Maarten on November 11th), but if you roam the internet as much as I do you can’t help being inspired by the festive spirit. So I decided to share the pumpkin cookies I baked this month.

Would you like one? ;)

The original recipe called for brrrrrrrrr-raisins. Me no like ;) So I substituted these for mixed nuts: 75 grams of almond and 30 gr pistachios, next to the already required 100 gr walnuts.

The cookies were less sweet because of it, but I fixed that by adding a bag of vanilla sugar and powdering the finished goodies. NICE. :)

All ‘testers’ remarked how good it was that they were not that sugary!

I should be honest and tell you that I couldn’t really taste the fresh ginger… But that doesn’t assure me that these treats would have been as good if it had been left out!

It also took me double time to bake ‘em: 30 minutes instead of 15. Next time I’ll turn up the heat! A notch at least ;)

There’s a set on Flickr showing pictures of all steps.

I’ve posted a more comprehensive recipe in Dutch at the Kookgrrls’ weblog

– – – – –

Join Beth Fish’s weekend cooking with a food-related post!

Belofte maakt schuld: in honing geroosterde wortelgroenten

Het is alweer even geleden dat ik het beloofde, maar ik zou het recept voor in honing geroosterde wortelgroenten nog posten. Een lekker gerecht voor mede-groentetas-bezitters die in de winter soms ook hun berg knollen zien groeien… Ik geef jullie het originele recept zodat je een idee hebt van de hoeveelheden, maar eigenlijk is het juist zo makkelijk dat je gewoon kunt pakken wat je voor handen hebt ;)

Nodig voor 4 personen:

• 60 g boter (niemand heeft mij horen zeggen dat het een light recept is ;)
• 2 el honing
• paar takjes tijm
• 3 wortels (evt. geschild), in grote stukken
• 2 pastinaken, geschild en in grote stukken
• 2 zoete aardappels (1 oranje, 1 wit)
• (8 kleine ingemaakte uien, geschild)
• 8 aardperen
• zout & peper
• 1 knoflookbol

Variatie: wortelpeterselie, pompoen, venkel, enz.

Bereiden:

• Oven voorverwarmen op 200 graden Celsius
• Knoflookbol in aluminiumfolie wikkelen
• Boter in een vuurvaste schaal op matig vuur smelten
• Honing en tijm toevoegen en even roeren
• Schaal van het vuur halen en de wortelgroenten toevoegen, met wat peper en zout naar smaak voorzichtig omroeren zodat alles bedekt raakt met de honingboter
• Schaal in de oven doen en de knoflook in folie erbovenop leggen
• Laat de groenten ca. 1 uur in de oven roosteren maar schep ze regelmatig even om voor gelijkmatig garen & karameliseren
• De knoflook is waarschijnlijk eerder klaar: folie eraf halen en teentjes pellen als ze wat zijn afgekoeld
• Knoflookteentjes door de groenten lepelen en klaar!

Wij hebben gewone aardappels gebruikt en rode ui in plaats van ingemaakte uitjes. Ook hadden we een restje venkel over dat erdoor ging, en wortelpeterselie. De knoflook vond ik wat veel zodat we een aantal teentjes — die tot puree waren gestoofd — hebben bewaard voor een roerbakgerecht enige dagen later.

Dit is echt een geslaagd kliekjesrecept om het groentenvak van je koelkast leeg te maken! :)

Het recept wordt veganistisch in plaats van vegetarisch wanneer je plantaardige margarine gebruikt en suiker in plaats van honing. Los de suiker dan wel eerst in de warme boter op. Je kunt natuurlijk ook een plantaardige olie nemen, maar liever geen olijfolie omdat de smaak daarvan teveel overheerst.

Bron recept: boekje VEGAGERECHTEN – van bijgerecht tot hoofdgerecht, Veltman Uitgevers 2005 (isbn: 90 5920 261 9)