Smashed Potatoes

This has become our new favorite potato recipe. Well, not real new, we've been making them for several months, and I may even have blogged them in the vegetarian days. But, we've been talking them up and now we've promised to share the know-how with whomever hasn't tried them before - and if you haven't, you really should. I know it's more than 2 steps, but these potatoes really are very easy to make!

Smashed Potatoes and  Asian-style Peas & Carrots

How These Delights are Made

1. Wash 15 or 20 fingerling or small new potatoes. Sometimes they can be pretty dirty!

New Potatoes

2. Cover 2/3 with veg stock - the broth does not completely cover the potatoes - and simmer over low heat until potatoes are tender and broth has simmered away. I don't have a pic of this step but I wish I did. Booo.

3. Smash with a fork! Don't completely mash them, just flatten them down a bit - there should be hash marks from the fork in them.

Smashed & Hashed Potatoes

4. Add 1 tbsp vegan butter and generous amounts of Herbamare and fry until brown.

Browned Smashed Potatoes

Bean & Lentil Salad

I made this bean salad to take with me to Sheephouse Falls tomorrow and it's very good so I wanted to document the recipe so we can make it again. It was inspired by our homegrown green beans along with the fact that we already had the other ingredients on hand.

Bean & Lentil Salad

Bean Mixture

3 cups cooked lentils
1 1/2 cups cooked black turtle beans
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
1 1/2 cups fresh green beans cut in 1" lengths, and cooked until tender
1/2  cup chopped scallions
1/3 cup white onion, chopped fine

Vinaigrette

10 sprigs of fresh parsley, stemmed and chopped
5 tbsp white vinegar
5 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
5 tsp white sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
1/8 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt or to taste

Mix the vinaigrette in with the bean mixture until everything is coated. Refrigerate overnight.

Protein

You may notice I use lentils in a lot of our dishes. A lot of people ask us where we get our protein and honestly, I get a lot of mine from lentils. We throw them into everything; gravies, sauces, soups, roasted veggies, salads, burgers...pretty much anything. We also eat beans quite a bit, especially in our Mexican food, which we have quite often.

Here is a breakdown of the protein in this salad. Mind you, this in in the entire salad, but even a 1-cup serving would have a substantial amount of protein.

3 cups lentils 54 g
1 1/2 cups black turtle beans 58.5 g
1 1/2 cups chickpeas 58.5 g
1 1/2 cups green beans 3 g

8 cups of food containing 174 g of protein. That amounts to 21.75 g per cup.

How much protein is enough?
They say you should have 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily. That means that most adults would need between 70-100 g of protein per day. Getting 1/5 to 1/4 in just one cup of bean salad is a great start to meeting the requirement.

Stuffed Squash with Brown Butter Sage Sauce

Laura has been harvesting a lot of herbs from the garden so I couldn't resist using some of our yummy sage in a brown butter sage sauce. I particularly love it on squash, although I'm sure it's good on many other things.

Stuffed Squash

Squash Stuffers

I cut a buttercup squash in half and de-seeded and de-pulped it, leaving twin squash bowls, which I placed into the roast pan. I knew I was going to fill those bowls with something but didn't quite know what. I opened the pantry and surveyed our supplies; we keep a lot of grains on hand. I debated between lentils, barley and rice and finally settled on parboiled and wild rice. I cooked about a cup of rice with 2 cups of water uncovered until the water was absorbed, added some dried sage, then spooned it into the squash bowls, filling each about halfway. I then topped them up with water since it was still only half cooked. Finally, I added 4 cups of water to the roast pan and placed it into a 400 degree oven for about an hour. The rice came out perfectly cooked. But! I wasn't done flavoring this dish yet.

Brown Butter Sage Sauce

I added 1/4 cup of vegan butter to a small pot on the stove and cooked on medium until it began to foam. Then I added a couple pinches of dried sage, crumbling it between my fingers. The butter quickly deep-fries the sage until crisp and it only takes a minute. Drizzled over the squash and rice it is sooo amazing.

Rules Be Damned

We served the squash and rice with a couple other veggies, namely potatoes and green beans. I know, I know, so much starch. Who has rice and potatoes? Funny thing is, when you make a diet change as big as going vegan, you tend to throw old conventions out the window. Bye bye old conventions. And good riddance!! Because this was one of the most amazing meals ever.

Squash & Rice, Smashed Potatoes and Green Beans

Best Dinner Ever

Show-Stopping Taters

Oh, and the stuffed squash was probably only the second-most delicious thing on the plate. The green beans were ultra fresh and cooked to perfection, but the potatoes stole the show and deserve their very own blog post. Stay tuned for the Smashed Potatoes blog.

Cabbage Rolls

Since cabbage rolls have always been one of my favorite dishes, I am really happy to discover that I can still enjoy them despite having given up eating meat. My aunt Emeline used to made cabbage rolls; they were kind of her thing. She used to steam the cabbage leaves in the dishwasher! I boiled mine in a big pot of water and they were easy to work with.

Vegan Cabbage Rolls

Sub the Meat for Lentils

Obviously there is no ground beef in these cabbage rolls. They're made with lentils instead, and they're actually pretty amazing. I've eaten them for supper twice and for lunch twice and I clean my plate every time.

Recipe Tweaking

Original recipe here
I stayed true to the original recipe with the exception of leaving the raisins out of the sauce. I think I would have liked the raisins, but Laura wasn't feeling it, so we decided to skip them. If I made them again, I would use less black pepper and a tiny bit more allspice.

Other things you could do would be to use other types of spices, or your favorite marinara instead of the sauce in the recipe. You could also use any kind of rice or other grain you want for the filling, or even add some veggies, like chopped spinach or kale.

Cabbage Rolls in Roast Pan

Takes Foreffingever

I have two complaints about making cabbage rolls. The first is that they are friggy and time-consuming. I don't think these can be made in an hour. The cabbage has to be cored, boiled and cooled. The rice and lentils both need to be cooked for the filling. There is chopping for both the sauce and the filling. For this first time, everything was measured. Then there is the wrapping, which can be a bit of an exercise in trial and error, especially at first. Then, finally, there is the cooking, which I think was about 45 minutes to an hour. You can't just come home from work and say, "Let's have cabbage rolls for supper!" and expect to eat before 9:00 pm. Not happening. No, these are a Sunday afternoon endeavor. But, worth it.

Makes a Huge Mess

The very worst part (my second and loudest complaint) about making cabbage rolls is that it creates a lot of dirty dishes - definitely not a one-pot meal. I think I dirtied a mixing bowl, a pot for the rice, a pot for the lentils, a pot for the sauce, 2 baking dishes (because I don't have a large one and had to use the small roast pan and a covered casserole dish), the grater, all the measuring cups and spoons, a wine glass and a big pile of utensils. Besides that, there was sauce splattered all over the stove, and bits of filling all over my work space and torn and shredded pieces of cooked cabbage all over the counter. And dishes everywhere. Not my ideal work environment, since I'm a "clean as you go" kind of kitchen bitch, but that doesn't seem to be entirely possible with these since there are too many things on the go at once. Wish I'd gotten a picture of it.

But again, it's worth it. And makes about 18 rolls.

Garden Vegetable Soup

I love soup so much and when the ingredients are this fresh, I love it even more. So good!

Vegetable Soup

Homegrown Veggies

Most of the ingredients in our soup today were harvested from the garden!

Snow Peas

The peas are growing like crazy out there, and needed to be picked so we are trying to incorporate them into every meal we can. 

Snow Peas

Beans

The beans are just getting started, due to late planting, but there were enough today to throw into the soup. We used a few Royal Burgundy bush beans and some green beans.

Chopped Beans & Peas

Potatoes & Carrots

The carrots aren't big yet either and needed to be thinned out in order to bulk up, so we thinned them out and used the teeny carrots in the soup.

The potatoes are still small too, but we've been harvesting a few of them anyway. We harvested a red potato plant called "Chieftain" for the soup.

Carrots & Red Potatoes

Kale

Kale isn't one of our favorite veggies, but it's great in soup so we made sure to chop a few leaves for it today. 

Kale

Fresh Herbs

The herbs have been growing well all summer and we harvest them as often as needed, and dry as many as we can for winter. Last year's herb harvest lasted all winter and we are still using some of them from 2015 this summer. We harvested parsley, thyme and oregano for the soup.

Parsley, Thyme & Oregano

We still have a bag of store-bought onions so we left the ones we planted in the garden to keep growing while we use what we already have. 

Garden Vegetable Soup Recipe

1 box vegetable soup

2 cups garden vegetable cocktail

4 cups water

1/4 cup rice

1/2 cup red lentils

1/2 cup soup mix (contains barley, lentils & various grains)

Several sprigs of parsley, thyme and oregano

3 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

Whatever vegetables in whatever amounts you want. I used:

• 2 small onions, chopped
• Handful of snow peas, trimmed and chopped
• Handful of green beans, trimmed and chopped
• 1 cup chopped carrots
• 3 cups potatoes
• 1 1/2 cups kale

Directions

I started with sautéing the onion in 1/2 cup water, then added the carrots. Next, I poured the box of vegetable broth in and then added the dried ingredients (rice, barley, etc). From there you can start adding the potatoes, beans & peas, kale and herbs, timed according to what takes longer to cook. I added the vegetable cocktail at the end, then began seasoning with the salt and pepper, tasting with every pinch to make sure it's not over-seasoned.

There are no real rules for making soup, but for it to taste good, seasonings are key. Salt is usually desired, but if you need to go low-sodium, go heavy on herbs, pepper, etc.

Pot of Soup