Potato and Leek Soup

Potato and Leek Soup

This recipe was too amazing not to share. We've made it twice now, the first time without carrots and the second time with. It's good both ways but I'll probably continue adding carrots whenever I make it, which will be often, because this soup is so good.

Original recipe here

Potato And Leek Soup

I didn't stray too far from the original recipe, which was already a vegan one. I changed a couple of things but it's basically the same recipe, so I can't take the credit for coming up with it, but I changed some amounts, skipped the lemon juice, and added carrots.

Another thing I did differently than the original recipe was to not puree all the veggies. Instead, I divided the soup in half and pureed half and left the other half as chunky vegetables for our chewing pleasure. I make a lot of pureed soups, like squash and cream of broccoli, but sometimes you want a little bite.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon vegan butter
2 small onions, diced
4 leeks, cleaned well & thinly sliced
7 medium russet potatoes, peeled and chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons salt, more to taste
Fresh ground pepper, to taste
1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
4 cups vegetable broth
2 bay leaves
1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup coconut coffee cream

Step 1:
Wash and slice the leeks, chop the potatoes, carrots and onions and toss them all in a soup pot on medium high with the butter.

Sauté the veggies

Step 2:
Mince the garlic and add to the sautéed veggies along with the seasonings about a minute before adding the broth.

Step 3:
Add the broth and simmer until all the veggies are tender, about 10 or 15 minutes.

Add the spices and broth

Step 4:
Take half the soup and blend in the blender or puree in the food processor then add back to the stock pot.

Puree half and add back to pot

Step 5:
Temper the cream by adding it slowly, while stirring, to 1/2 cup of the hot soup, then add the mixture to the pot, continuing to stir it in well.

Step 6:
Serve and eat! We served our with some lovely artisan bread. So yummy!

Leek and potato soup with bread

Enjoy!!

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

Eggless Potato Salad

You might not think an egg-free potato salad would be as good, but you'd be surprised. I don't let many people try it because it's really too good to share, but any who have tried it absolutely loved it and three of them have asked for the recipe. And, since it's my favorite potato salad recipe now too, I thought I'd put it here.

Potato Salad

The Making of the Perfect Potato Salad

In this potato salad recipe you omit the eggs and use an egg-free mayonnaise, like vegenaise, which I love, love, love.

This recipe makes a pretty small salad. You may want to double it.

Mix in a large bowl:
8 potatoes, peeled and boiled
1 small onion, minced
1/4 cup minced red pepper
1 tbsp capers or minced green olives (optional, but not really)

Mix in a small bowl:
1 cup Vegenaise or Hellman's vegan mayonnaise
1/3 cup vinegar
2 or 3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp dijon
1 tbsp yellow mustard
Sea salt and black pepper to taste

Add small bowl mixture to large bowl mixture - don't add it all at once, just add it until your salad is the consistency you like.  You know how potatoes come in many sizes. Combine well.

Top the salad with something to make it look pretty, or interesting, like pepper, paprika, or some extra capers or olives. Maybe a sprig of parsley.

Chill.

Potato Salad

Potato Salad

You are welcome.

Homemade Perogies

Week nine of our vegan diet and so far it's going pretty well. I mean, I love the food I eat (a bit too much, maybe, but all my dietary choices have been like that), but it can be challenging to keep up in the kitchen. I don't feel like cooking every night, and neither does Laura. We really try not to eat a lot of highly processed food, so meal prep can be a time suck. I'm sure we'll learn lots of tricks and find recipes that are quick to make. But, this weekend I made these Smashed Bean Burgers and man, they took awhile. Partly because we don't use canned beans, though. A can of canned beans would make this recipe a cinch. More about the making of them below.

Smashed Bean Burger with Perogies

Sometimes You Just Want a Good Sandwich

Choices seem limited in these early days. You have to really switch gears because your old favorites probably need some serious tweaking. Sandwich? Brain comes up with: peanut butter, toasted tomato or cucumber and....umm...maybe...?...jam. Molasses? PB and molasses? I don't know. However, there are a lot of great sandwiches that look very appealing to me. A lot of them have sprouts on them so I think it's time we grew some more sprouts. I want to try this Smashed White Bean & Avocado Club sandwich - looks delish to me. This Mashed Chickpea Salad sandwich looks awesome too - just looks a bit on the time consuming side. A Sunday endeavor...

Kitchen Time

It's the weekend, so we're in the kitchen cooking. Today the menu is perogies and bean burgers. The burgers aren't the same as our beloved Butter Bean Burgers, but they're still awesome, with a similar flavor and texture to falafel. We're also going to be making corn chowder and biscuits. There should be enough food to freeze a couple meals to have for lunch and enjoy later in the week as well.

Preparing food at home rather than relying on ready made items allows you to:

• Make food that you really like, the way you like it best
• Skip or substitute ingredients you don't enjoy
• Avoid preservatives
• Eat fresher food
• Make way more for less money (usually)

Laura's Perogies

Laura made the perogies and they turned out fantastic - definitely worth documenting the recipe since she made it up so there's no record of it.

Laura's Perogies

Filling
Sauté:
1/2 small onion, finely diced
Once softened, add in:
4 oz white mushrooms, diced fine
4 oz portobello, diced fine
1-1/2 tsp salt

Mix sautéed mixture with:
5 potatoes, cooked and mashed
4 scallions, green parts, snipped
1 tbsp dried parsley
1 tbsp vegan butter (Earth Balance)
3 heaping tsp nootch
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
2 - 3 splashes almond milk

Perogie Filling

Reminder for next time: The filling could have used twice as many mushrooms.

Dough

Recipe here for Perogie Dough. We substituted the vegetable oil with olive oil. 

After the perogies were wrapped, Laura rolled about 18 of them and popped them into the freezer, leaving the rest of the filling in the fridge to wrap later. The dough is wrapped and resting in a bowl on the counter.  We cooked a dozen of the frozen ones for lunch. First you boil them for two minutes, then fry them for four or five minutes on each side until brown and crispy and heated through. I fried them on medium low heat. They were fantastic, and completely dairy free! 

Smashed Bean Burgers

This recipe came from the Thug Kitchen cookbook. I am not going to post the recipe here, but if you happen to have it and find the burgers aren't forming and are falling apart I'll share with you a tip I learned in this frustrating process. As stated above, we don't usually use canned beans, which are nice and mushy. I cooked mine from scratch and probably should have overcooked them, because they were difficult to mash and there were still a lot of whole beans in there. When I went to make the patties, they just kept falling apart. Here's what to do if you have the same problem: take at least half of your mixture and put it in the food processor for half a minute. It will make a formed ball of nice sticky dough. Then mix it in with the rest of the mixture and it will make beautiful patties that hold together very well. 

Bean Burger Patties

I had tried to cook three of the patties before we came up with the amazing solution and when I flipped them they all just crumbled. But...they were still delicious. So, that mixture will be used in wraps tomorrow night, probably with some chopped cucumber, tomato, onion and tahini sauce. Looking forward to it...

Cooked Crumbled Bean Burger Mixture

Update: So, we totally had the wraps on Monday with a tahini sauce, and they were fabulous!

Bean Wraps

Freezer to Oven

On a good note, we now have 5 burgers to freeze and grab next time we don't feel like cooking. And, the perogies mixture will make about 4 dozen to freeze as well. This is the key to being able to eat freezer to oven, and still eat healthy whole foods. It requires a few hours of time on the weekend, but it is worth it to not have to cook every day during the week.