Roasted Tomato Basil Soup

Not long ago, I was not a huge fan of the idea of soup during summer. It seemed to boggle my mind as to why someone would want to eat something hot, while it is hot.

Not too long ago, I got the craving for soup and made a recipe for the cookbook and it turned out that I actually loved soup in the summer. I like to eat light in the summer, I hate being really full when it is hot and humid outside, and soup is a great option and a way to take advantage of all the veggies of summer.

And who doesn't like tomato soup? I've always been a huge fan of tomato soup, but I think I have outgrown the ability to eat Campbell's canned soups. Especially with all the gorgeous tomatoes available at the farmer's market. So I decided to try my hand at making a home-made tomato soup and it wasn't bad at all. In fact, it was pretty darn tasty!


(Sorry for the crummy picture.)

The local booty legend (aka revealing my sources):
no asterisk = grocery store
+ = local produce from The Root Cellar
++ = The Peace Nook (will denote whether product is local or just from the Nook)
* = farmer's market
** = CSA
*** = Container or Community Garden
**** = the non-profit buying club, Blue Planet or Purcell Mountain Farms

Roasted Tomato Basil Soup
6 red tomatoes, cored **
1 heirloom tomato (we used a pink variety), cored *
1 yellow onion, skin removed **
1 head of garlic, top removed to expose some of the garlic clove
3-4 tbsp. canola oil
salt
pepper
1 cup veggie broth
1 cup non-dairy or cow's milk
1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped ***

Preheat oven to 400.

Drizzle oil over tomatoes, onion, and garlic. Season with salt and pepper.

Roast for about 30 minutes, turning the onion about halfway through. Be watchful, you don't want to overcook the tomato.

Peel garlic cloves and transfer the veggies and veggie broth to a blender or food process. Blend until very smooth.

Strain mixture through a wire mesh strainer into a small pan on medium heat on the stove. (We fed the left over pulp that remained after straining to the worms, and they liked it!)

Add the milk and basil and heat through.

Serve with crackers, bread, or the classic grilled cheese sandwich.

Yum!

'Til next time!

Manchurian-ish Mushrooms

We've been in "Mexi-mode" lately almost exclusively with my testing and restesting recipes for the cookbook. On Friday, I was looking at the website TasteSpotting and decided to do a search of the word "spicy", 'cause that's how I roll. One of the recipes that came up was for Manchurian Mushrooms. The picture was so drool-worthy that I had to go look at the recipe. I sounded absolutely amazing. I sent the recipe and picture to both Brett and Selina (she and I have very similar tastes). Brett, who claims to be "Asian-ed out" took one look at the recipe and agreed that we should try it and soon. Selina was on the same page as me and wanted to make it as soon as possible.

I started from this recipe here. I didn't have some of the stuff on hand and I wanted to make sure that the mushrooms were spicy to my liking and the sauce was sweet to Brett's liking so I tweaked the recipe and provided it below.




You may note some new serving ware here and there. My Nanny Beth (among others) wanted our food to look nicer since we put pictures of it online, so she got us these "rooster bowls" which look really cool with Asian food and some plates for us to use for our "Mexican presentations". Now all I have to do is learn how to use a camera and get some sort of eye for "food fashion". Hell, I am just the cook, Selina, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE PRESENTATION UP TO ME FOR THE COOKBOOK. It would just be bad. You've seen my titles for things and my lack of skill with the camera, you do not want that. :-)

Well, here she be.

The local booty legend (aka revealing my sources):
no asterisk = grocery store
+ = local produce from The Root Cellar
++ = The Peace Nook (will denote whether product is local or just from the Nook)
* = farmer's market
** = CSA
*** = Container or Community Garden
**** = the non-profit buying club, Blue Planet or Purcell Mountain Farms

J&B's Manchurian-ish Mushrooms
1 pack button mushrooms, rinsed and quartered
3-4 cups peanut oil for frying

Spicy Batter:
1 cup all purpose flour
2 tbsp corn masa
2 tsp (or more!) of chile-garlic sauce (I used Huy Fong)
4 Chiles Japones, crushed with a mortar and pestle (you could also use a food processor or coffee grinder, or just crush them up with your fingers)
1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
salt to taste
1 cup water

Combine all the dry ingredients in a medium sized bowl. Slowly add the water and mix well, making sure to work out all the clumps.

Sweet and Sour Sauce:
2 tbsp peanut oil
2 small red boiler onions, chopped *
3 banana peppers, seeded and sliced *
2 small green bell peppers, sliced into 1/2 inch pieces *
1 head broccoli, cut into florettes *
1/2 yellow summer squash, cut into large chunks **
1 head Georgian Fire garlic, sliced *
2 tbsp alfalfa honey *
3/4 cup organic ketchup
4 tbsp sweet chile sauce
3 tbsp shoyu (or other soy sauce)
4 tbsp fresh cilantro, chopped (for garnish, optional)

Heat the oil in a large skillet or wok over medium-high heat.

Add the onion, peppers, broccoli, and squash and saute stirring often for about 6-8 minutes.

Add the garlic and stir fry for another 3-4 minutes.

Turn the heat down to slightly below medium.

Add the honey, ketchup, chile sauce, and shoyu. Combine well.

Let simmer on low while you batter and fry the mushrooms.

To batter and fry the mushrooms and finish up the dish:

Put your peanut oil in a heavy bottomed small skillet and turn heat on the low end of high (does that make sense?).

Dip the mushrooms pieces in the batter and once oil is heated carefully drop them in the hot oil.

Fry for 6-8 minutes or until mushroom pieces are deep golden brown. Transfer to paper towels to drain the excess oil. Repeat this process until all the mushrooms are fried.

Put the fried mushrooms into the sweet and sour sauce and stir to coat evenly. Top with cilantro. Serve immediately.

This was really freakin' good. It tasted like something you would get from a restaurant. It isn't the least time consuming of the recipes here on Veg*n Cooking, but it is well worth the effort.

'Til next time!

Local Kidney Bean and Veggie Burgers

I was going to post about a meal of local Walnut Pesto and pasta, but I decided against it for a number of reasons. First off, I forgot to take a picture of the meal. Secondly, I have posted about our Walnut Pesto before and since I had plans for another local meal in mind, I decided to make this post our weekly One Local Summer entry.

One of the many things I really love about summer is bean and veggie burgers. I don't know why I associate these foods with summer, but I seem to. I have so many created recipes and ideas for bean, grain, and veggie burgers that it is often hard to know where to start. I've noticed now that I've been regularly going to market for a few years now, that we go there and let the produce plan the meals. Based on what is available, what looks best, a menu begins to form in my head and we just roll with it.

With the weather being warm and summer-like and the local veggies abounding, I decided to make a local bean and veggie burger. These burgers were amazing and they have so much potential to be even better. I will share the initial recipe, but let me tell you - this, like most of my other recipes will be tweaked to our liking over time until we get it just right. You all get what I like to call the "rough draft" of the recipe. Sometimes when we are done modifying these recipes, they are nothing like their originals, but that is part of the fun of evolving recipes.


We served our burgers with local garlicky roasted asparagus. I sliced up about 4 baby garlics, tossed the asparagus with olive oil, salt, and the garlic, and roasted it on 375 for about 15 minutes. So, so good.


The local booty legend (aka revealing my sources):
no asterisk = grocery store
+ = local produce from The Root Cellar
++ = The Peace Nook (will denote whether product is local or just from the Nook)
* = farmer's market
** = CSA
*** = Container or Community Garden
**** = the non-profit buying club, Blue Planet or Purcell Mountain Farms

Local Kidney Bean and Veggie Burgers
Makes about six patties.

4 cups kidney beans, mashed with a fork +
1 habanero, seeded and minced * (frozen from last year)
2 hot Hungarian wax peppers, seeded and minced *** (frozen from last year)
1/2 green bell pepper, seeded and minced *** (frozen from last year)
1 cup oyster mushrooms, minced *
6 spring onions, minced *
4 baby garlics, minced *
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, minced *
1/2 cup garlic chives, minced *
4 tbsp regular rolled oats
6-8 tbsp whole wheat pastry flour +
1 egg *
squirt sriracha
chili powder
cumin
black pepper
salt

Combine all ingredients and seasonings except egg in a bowl using the seasonings to taste. Add the egg.

Form into patties and refrigerate for about an hour to allow patties to get a bit more firm.

Preheat oven to 375 and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Bake burgers in oven for 15 minutes, flip patties and cook for an additional 15 minutes on the other side.

Remove from oven and let rest for about 10 minutes.

Serve on a bun with your favorite toppings, we used:
veganaise
organic ketchup
pickles +
sliced tomatoes *
leaf lettuce **

These were so good. I cannot wait to try out all the crazy combinations I have for burgers and patties in my head. I love summer!

There hasn't seemed to be too awful much interest in the It Seemed Like A Good Idea At the Time Writing Contest, but I'm not too upset by that. I am a fan of quality over quantity, so if just one person writes a good piece, I will think the contest has been a success.

A bit of house cleaning related to the Writing Contest - if you want to participate, but do not have a blog, just send your entry to jheartschilepeppers@live.com and I will post it on Veg*n Cooking as a guest post.

Also, while you can still vote for what you think the prize for the contest will be, the winner will ultimately get to decide between the choices given.

I hope you all consider writing a short (or not-so-short) piece for the contest, I know there are a lot of witty people out there with great minds, let's use 'em!

'Til next time.

Weekly Local Booty - Farmer's Market and First CSA Share - May 16, 2009

The weather in Mid-Missouri has been typically unstable for the past few days - oh, and of course the rain just keeps 'a comin'. Yesterday it was in the 80s and really humid. We spent the evening getting flash floods in our parking lot and this morning it was in the 50s on my way to market. And windy, though that is something I am just going to have to get used to. Needless to say, even with Missouri's moody weather patterns, my trip to the farmer's market this morning was a resounding success, though I missed having Brett with me. He is taking his finals today (on a Saturday, doesn't that suck?), so I was on my own, but I managed all right. I've got a bit of a shoulder cramp after carrying it all home, but I survived. We also got our first CSA share this week!

I think he will be excited to come home to the beautiful local dinner I have planned. It will also be our "One Local Summer" entry for the week - nothing special, but super tasty and almost all local - pesto pasta with fresh tomatoes, garlicky roasted asparagus, and a simple local salad. The only things in the meal that will not be local is the olive oil in the pesto and some of the ingredients in the dressing - though the dressing is locally made.

Anyway, enough of my incessant yammering check out our grub!

Here is our first CSA of the year:


Starting from the bottom right: fresh oregano, two bunches of asparagus (Danjo Farms has the best asparagus we have ever had), spring onions, fresh salad greens, and radishes.

Here is the weekly farmer's market haul. This cost around $80. More than I usually spend at market by a long shot, but I wanted to get tomato starts and we needed to stock up on some of the more expensive things we get like honey.


Starting from the bottom right: 2 bunches of spring onions, a bunch of garlic chives, 2 cucumbers, 4 big 'ol tomatoes, 1/2 lb. oyster mushrooms (I love this new purveyor, I will have to make sure to note the name of the stand next weekend, they have the best oyster mushrooms we've ever had. We got some over the winter from the Root Cellar, but they don't hold a candle to these.), 2 bunches of baby garlic, a dozen eggs, 2 bunches of sweet basil, asparagus, Moneymaker tomato starts, Country Goodies hot chow chow, Tigerella tomato starts, strawberries (!!!!!), Bonne Femme Honey Farms alfalfa honey, Thai basil, cilantro, and spinach.

Whew! What a list! We have a lot of good grub to work with this week. I was already planning the menu on my walk home from market. I love getting whatever is freshest and figuring out how to make it shine from there.

We got some really awesome things this week, and a lot of them, so I thought I would photograph individually some of my favorite finds of the week.


This has to be one of the most gorgeous bunches of oyster mushrooms I have ever seen.


Strawberries! I got to market pretty early this morning - it opens at 8:00 and I got there a little after 8:30 and this was the last container of strawberries the purveyor had, and the one other purveyor with strawberries had two or three containers left. The broccoli had already been cleaned out!


Thai basil! I haven't quite decided what I am going to do with all of this yet, but I have wanted to try it for a couple of years and I have saved a bunch of recipes that call for it in hopes that I would eventually find it. I had no idea it was as pretty as it is.


Four Tigerella tomato starts. We got these from Danjo Farms - the farm we get our CSA through. Dan sells all sorts of varieties of open pollinated heirloom tomatoes; it was really hard to choose. We've had a bit of trouble with our tomato starts from seed this year - they are growing, but not as quickly as we had hoped they would, so we wanted to get a few mature tomato plants so that we will have solid production. We hope our tomato seedlings continue to grow; we can't wait to put them in the ground.


Four Moneymaker tomato starts - these should be good slicers which is one of our favorite ways to have tomatoes, raw with just a bit of salt. I don't even want to venture a guess as to how many pounds of tomatoes we ate like that last year.

So these are eight of our who knows how many tomato plants. We are hoping to have about a dozen or more tomato plants and half a dozen tomatillo plants, if they will ever grow that is.

A week or so ago, I transplanted all our pepper starts into containers on the porch. As of right now, we have about 20 pepper plants, and I imagine a few will make their way into the fold before all is said and done. We have a planter box of acorn squash on the porch, chard, spinach, kale, and basil will also be staying on the porch, and we have some beans, squash, cukes, peas, and tomato starts waiting to go in the community garden.

I don't know if anyone remembers the cayenne plant we had started from seed late last fall, but it survived and managed to thrive in our apartment and it has one full sized pepper on it already, two baby ones, and tons of blooms. We transplanted it into the container we had our broccoli in last year and hope it will get HUGE.

Anyway, if it ever decides to stay dry for more than a day around here, we can get down to the community garden and get to work. It is starting to look like we may have to just have to get stuff in rain or shine. Ugh.

Have a great weekend everyone!

'Til next time.

Local Spring Veggies and Pasta!

I really love simple and tasty food - that is as local as possible. I love it when ingredients shine on their own, in their own glory. Until a few years ago when I started going to the farmer's market and growing my own veggies, I didn't know what I was missing - the amazing flavors, colors, textures available. Ordinary foods I used to eat without issue such as tomatoes, I know shun in the winter (unless canned from summer of course) as the store bought ones just don't cut it, they taste horrible and their texture is gritty.

Spring at the farmer's market brings out many things tasty and green. I threw this dish together in no time, and the only non-local ingredients are the few seasonings in the dish.

















This is my bowl, topped with crushed red pepper. It seems like if I can make something spicy, I will. :-)

The local booty legend (aka revealing my sources):
no asterisk = grocery store
+ = local produce from The Root Cellar
++ = The Peace Nook (will denote whether product is local or just from the Nook)
* = farmer's market
** = CSA
*** = Container or Community Garden
**** = the non-profit buying club, Blue Planet or Purcell Mountain Farms

Local Spring Veggies and Pasta
1 lb. penne pasta, cooked according to package instructions *
1 bunch of asparagus, woody ends removed, cut in half inch pieces *
6 spring onions, minced *
1 cup oyster mushrooms, chopped *
1 tomato, chopped *
6 cups spinach, chopped *
1/2 cup garlic chives, minced *
2-3 tbsp canola oil
splash of balsamic vinegar
pinch of salt
pinch of pepper

Heat oil in a medium skillet.

Add the asparagus and mushrooms and cook for about 5 minutes. Add the onions, tomato, and spinach. Cook for an additional 6-8 minutes, stirring often.

Add the garlic chives, cook for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

Toss veggies with cooked pasta. Season with balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper.

If you are like me, add something spicy on top!

Well, we've got market tomorrow, it is the first week for our CSA and I hope there is a bunch of Dan's amazing asparagus. I swear we didn't get enough of it last year (though I'm not sure what enough would be exactly), it is some of the best, most flavorful asparagus I have ever had. I am also excited to see what other goodies we might score from the market this weekend.

It has been really rainy here, well, for the past few weeks, so getting things into the ground at the community garden has once again been difficult this year. We transplanted a bunch of peppers starts, and starts planned for the community garden that had outgrown their pots. I will be taking them down and sowing some more seed on Sunday. I may end up a mudball as I did last year, but the stuff is ready to go!

In other news, for the last few years we've had a common nighthawk roosting on top of one of the buildings in our neighborhood. It took us four years to identify what the bird who screeched all night and would dive bomb from the sky was. Anyway, once we figured out what kind of bird she was, we began to watch her at dusk when we could. It is really neat to watch them dive bomb for bugs. If they do it close enough to you, you can actually hear a whirring sound go by with them, they go really fast. Once they had migrated for the winter, we weren't sure if they would come back to the same spot to roost. We were happy to hear that familiar screech about two days ago and sure enough, there one was, soaring in the sky, screeching her rather unpleasant screech (you get used to it) and dive bombing for the year's first bugs. Nature is pretty cool, even in the city, if you just stop to pay attention. :-)

Well, I'll be back sometime this weekend for the weekly local booty update and our first CSA share!

I hope everyone has a good weekend and to those who go to market over the weekend, happy "hunting".

'Til next time.