Baked Potato and Broccoli Soup with Potato Croutons

Ok, so in addition to the copious amounts of pumpkin, I am also surrounded by russet potatoes. A perfect time to try Isa's recipe for baked potato soup in Veganomicon. I substituted broccoli for the Kale because I was really wanting broccoli soup (not because i don't love Kale.. cause I do).



Served with the Potato Crouton (in the recipe), fakin' bacon, and scallions.

Pumpkin Curry

With all that pumpkin in the house, I decided it was time for a pumpkin curry. I was try to recreate a dish that an Indian friend made for me once. I was close and this was good, but we felt like it was missing a sweet element. We never did decide what we would change next time on this so if any of you Indian food cooks out there have an idea, let me know. Maybe it needs tomatoes... or tamarind... or fenugreek.... or... ?

Pumpkin Curry

1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 onion, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp canola oil
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1" ginger, minced
1 jalepeno, minced
1 Tbsp Garam Masala
2 tsp curry powder
1/4 tsp tumeric
1 tsp salt (add more to taste at the end)
1 cup water
4 cups pumpkin, cut into 1 inch pieces
4 red baby potatoes, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 carrots, cut into 1 inch pieces
1/2 large red bell pepper, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 can coconut milk
1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
2 Tbsp cilantro, chopped


Add canola oil to a large pot and heat over med-high heat. When the pot is hot, add the mustard seeds and cumin seeds. Cook stirring until they start to pop. Add the onions. Cook until the onions brown (about 7-10 minutes) stirring occasionally to keep the spices from burning. Add the garlic, ginger, and jalepeno. Cook for a minute or two until fragrant. Add the spices and salt. Cook another minute.

Add one cup of water, stir to deglaze. Add the vegetables. Add the can of coconut milk. Cover and lower heat and simmer 30 minutes. When the vegetables are starting to get tender, add the chickpeas and cook another 10-15 minutes. Add the cilantro and server over brown rice.

Psst - Kim if you are reading this, I was trying to recreate that dish we had at your house last fall after pumpkin/apple picking. Find out what I am missing, please!!!! :)

Pumpkin and Black Bean Casserole

Isn't this casserole beautiful. It made the house smell as good as it looks.



This is a Pumpkin Black Bean Casserole, recipe from Fat Free Vegan. It has layers of thinly sliced pumpkin, layers of a mexican chile flavored black bean mixture with tomatoes and corn, and then a cheesy sauce. It tasted like a spicy, cheesy chili. Since it was pretty spicy, I think I may have goofed and added more Ancho or Chipolte than it called for. I'll be making this again so I'll know the answer next time if it doesn't come out as spicy. This goes great with some blue corn chips.

Things that I think I will change next time: I think I will saute the onions first. My onion was really really strong and overpowered things a bit. And, I think that 1/2 way through the baking time I will add some crushed blue corn chips to the top. Now I can't wait to make it again. You may see this one again next week!

Cooking when you have no time to cook

After working from home for a while (and previous to that, a 8-5 cushy job), I recently started working with my husband at a new job. And working about 50-60 hours a week. Between that and hiking, there isn't much time left for cooking. In the past we've always been able to work out cooking dinner. We'd make a menu and then if one of us was running late, the other would start dinner. Now when one of us is running late, we are both running late and dinner doesn't happen. The first couple of weeks I worked with him, we found that we were suddenly eating like crap. Lots of chinese takeout and burritos. We decided that we had to do something different. So we started cooking almost all of our week's food over the weekend (still hard with the amount of hiking and biking we were doing in the summer). It is kind of a painful process but for the rest of the week, we are very happy we did it. I thought that I would share a few tips for busy cooks. Even if you don't cook everything in a couple of nights like we have been trying to do, these are still useful prep tricks for middle of the week cooking.

Your food processor is your friend. Use it to shred cabbage, slice carrots, celery, zucchini, etc. Get the food processor dirty once and slice up as much as you can. Place vegetables in tupperware or plastic bags. Some vegetables like zucchini do better if you wrap them in a damp paper towel.

Chop up as much as you can ahead of time. You can cut up all your stir fry vegetables and then you are ready to cook when you get home with almost no prep. I chop almost all vegetables ahead of time, except potatoes. Potatoes sometimes turn brown so I wait and do them as needed.

In a mini chopper (or food processor) place a head's worth of garlic cloves in and mince. Put the garlic in a small tupperware container with a little olive oil. Store it in the fridge. It keeps for a stunningly long time. You can also do this with ginger.

Make a big pot of rice and put it in the fridge for the week. Rice takes a long time to cook. This also makes stir-fry an easy weeknight dinner.

If you do want to try to cook everything ahead of time, plan for a few nights worth of food plus a couple night of leftovers. Make big pots of stews and soups. Casseroles are also good for make ahead food. Pasta and sauce also hold up well. You can make pasta, drain it, toss it with a little olive oil and throw it into a ziploc bag in the fridge. I also make side dishes such as sauteed corn or greens or roasted beets and put them in the fridge for eating later in the week. When I get done cooking for the week, my fridge is full of food and my vegetable bin is almost empty. It is an oddly satisfying feeling.

When ski season hits and we are snowboarding all weekend, we won't have as much time to make everything ahead of time so we will try to change tactics a bit... and we won't be overrun with CSA vegetables after December s we will have more control over how much we need to cook. At that point, I expect there will be more spaghetti and "meatballs", burritos, tacos, and pizza in our house on weeknights. I'll still try to get at least one big pot of soup or stew cooked on the weekend so we don't starve. And, I am definitely going to keep prepping all the vegetables over the weekend.

African Groundnut Stew with Kuri Squash

Last night we made African Groundnut Stew from Voluptuous Vegan. Groundnut, in this case, refers to the 1/4 cup of peanut butter that finished the stew. Yum! This is a recipe that has become a fall favorite in our house. We only get to make it in the fall when we are getting fresh local interesting squash. I always make it with a Kuri Squash which is the red one in the picture below.



It is a time consuming recipe, but the results are well worth it. In addition to Kuri squash, the stew also has roasted cauliflower in it, carrots, sweet potatoes, potato (instead of the turnip it called for because I had potatoes), garlic, lots of ginger, ginger juice, cilantro, onions, and scallions. But its the peanut butter, ginger, and the squash that are the real stars of this stew:

This week has been brought to you by the vegetable: Pumpkin

Holy Pumpkin! I have a lot of pumpkin. So, don't be at all surprised that almost everything I post this week will be made with Pumpkin! In addition to the 3 main courses I made over the weekend (for next week - but that's another post), pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin muffins... I still put 4 cups of pumpkin puree away in the freezer. This big guy, an Aluminum Squash, made 6 cups of pumpkin puree! We forgot to get a picture of this pumpkin until after we sliced it open:



The first cup of this pumpkin puree went into Pumpkin Cookies. This recipe is from Dabbles with Apples. These are soooo good and the crunchy brown sugar in the frosting is the best! They are like little cupcakes in the shape of cookies. I didn't change anything about this recipe, but I did need to add a little more powdered sugar to the frosting.



Psst - Liz... you need to make these!

So angry tonight, stupid local news

I'm sitting here playing on my computer and the local news is on the tv in the background. Fox Utah. I look up and there is a story about a cat stuck in a tree and how the "rescuers" sprayed the cat with a hose and then planned to catch it with a net. The cat fell about 30 feet and was missed and hit the ground. The stupid news presented this story as funny. The end of the story said "don't worry the cat is fine and only broke a tooth in his fall" uh huh huh huh. I'm in total disbelief that anyone would find that funny. You can bet that before I wrote this, I wrote an email to the news channel. Anyway, i knew you guys would understand.