It's All About the Vegetables

So here's a question...what do I do when I am completely uninspired to cook anything? I wish the answer was that I just could order takeout, but there are really only so many times a person can eat Chipotle in a month and still keep it as a favorite restaurant. Instead, my inspiration often comes around just the way it did today...by looking in the fridge and freaking out about how disorganized it is and how much stuff there is in there waiting to be used up. Works every time!

(I thought briefly about posting a photo of my fridge, but it is really just embarrassing in its level of disorganization. So you will have to use your imagination there.)

You see, I HATE to have food go to waste. I have already thrown away enough food from my pantry due to our omnipresent mouse population and their penchant for wanting to just taste everything they can get their paws on, so I really try to avoid pitching stuff from the fridge. When I opened the door today I was surprised to notice how many of the veggies from last week's CSA box were still sitting snugly in the produce drawers. With 2 days of lighter than usual cooking coming up I knew I needed to get a move on and make a serious dent in the veggies tonight.

Once I cataloged my produce and made a general plan for the next 4 days menus I hit the cookbooks and the internet in search of some inspiration. As is always the case, once I started looking at recipes my plan changed dramatically, but it all worked out in the end.

For today I wanted to use up the sunchokes, cauliflower, broccoli, beet, garlic and tempeh that I had kicking around. I began with a plan for roasting all the veggies but ended up with a soup, a lentil salad and some tempeh bacon. Everything was easy, as usual, although the soup and the tempeh took a bit of time. I didn't get to use the broccoli after all, but in retrospect I realize I could have used it in the lentil and beet salad. Next time! In the meantime though, the recipes are as follows:

Creamy roasted sunchoke, cauliflower and sweet potato soup
(This recipe is adapted from one I found at batterlicker.com.)

- 3/4 pound of sunchokes, cleaned well and sliced into 1/2 inch thick slices
- 1 head cauliflower, florets cut into 1/2 inch thick slices
- 1 large white sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch thick slices (seeing a theme?)
- 5 cloves of garlic, whole
- juice of one lemon
- 1/4 cup water
- one large onion, chopped up small
- 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock
- 2 cups milk (you can also use cream or plain unsweetened almond milk)
- salt to taste

- Preheat the oven to 375. Prepare two cookie sheets by greasing them (I lined them with parchment paper first).
- Put the sliced sunchokes and cauliflower in a bowl and add the lemon juice and water. Toss well.
- Place the sunchokes, cauliflower, sweet potato and garlic on the cookie sheets in a single layer.
- Roast for 20 minutes, turning once. If you don't turn them, they may burn on the bottom. I learned this the hard way.
- Heat a teaspoon of oil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and saute for about 7 minutes.
- Add the stock and the milk and bring to a boil.
- Add the roasted vegetables and simmer for 5 minutes or so, until they are very soft.
- Puree in your blender and serve. (Don't forget to puree in batches so that you don't blow the top off of your blender. I learned that the hard way a long time ago.)

This was sweet and a little nutty and got the thumbs up from all the adults here. Z didn't love it, but he doesn't love soup in general so that is to be expected. Once I put some cheese on it he took the required number of bites without complaining though!

Veggies waiting to roast

The finished product


Now on to the tempeh bacon!

In and effort to expand our culinary horizons, I bought a box of tempeh a while back. Actually I bought two: once was a box of plain tempeh and one was a box of coconut curry tempeh. Little did I know that neither one was any good until it was heated up and that the plain tempeh actually needed to have a sauce of some sort applied to it! Accordingly, that plain tempeh has sat around in my fridge for a number of weeks waiting until I was fed up with its presence. Today was its lucky day!

A few years ago we went on a family camping trip all around Northern California. It was gorgeous, and we had a ball. But we ate freeze dried camping meals for an entire week. We finally broke the habit when we hit a health food store in Humboldt. For my first real meal I selected a "fakin' bacon" BLAT (that's bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato). Now I don't really know if it was delicious just because it was the first fresh food I had eaten in a week, but that sandwich was amazing. So amazing that I still dream about it today. Of course, I have not been able to find veggie bacon that I like so much since then. With that in mind, I figured the only logical thing to do with my tempeh was to make tempeh bacon.

To be brief, D loved it, but I was a little disappointed. All the tempeh bacon recipes I found called for liquid smoke, and I discovered today that I really just don't like the stuff. I also think that the flavor just wasn't quite as sweet or as strong as I would have liked. I think next time I will try cooking down the marinade so that it is a little more of an intensely flavored glaze before I put it on the tempeh. But for now, here is the recipe that was the starting point:

Tempeh Bacon
(adapted from a BUNCH of websites, most closely related to http://kblog.lunchboxbunch.com)

- 1 8 ounce package of tempeh, sliced very thin
- 1/4 cup maple syrup
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 2 teaspoons liquid smoke
- 2 teaspoons soy sauce

Combine all of the marinade ingredients together. Put the tempeh slices in a large shallow pan (I used a pyrex 11 x 13 inch baking dish) and cover with the marinade. Turn the slices over a few times to make sure they are well covered. Marinate for 1 to 2 hours.

Heat a large frying pan coated with a spritz of spray oil over medium high heat. In batches (so that you have only a single layer of tempeh in the pan) cook the tempeh for about two minutes per side. Make sure to spoon a little of the marinade over the cooking tempeh when you put it in the pan so that it caramelizes some.

I think it needed salt. I am not sure how that could be given the soy sauce, but it just was missing something!

Last but not least, the Lentil and Beet Salad. This got started because I wanted to use up the last beet(s) in our fridge. I had roasted them days ago so I knew we needed to move them on out soon. Of course, I could have just put them on my beet-loving husband's plate, but I wanted to do MORE than that. So using up the beets required purchasing mint, lentils and an onion. Not the most efficient way to accomplish that task! Especially when I got home and found that my husband had been making quick work of the leftover beets anyway so there was really only one left to work with! It all worked out though, because this salad was tasty!

Beet, Lentil and Goat Cheese Salad
(thanks to Amy Pennington's "Urban Pantry" cookbook from which I poached and altered this recipe)

- 3/4 package of Trader Joe's refrigerated lentils, or 2 cups of cooked black lentils
- 3 roasted, peeled and diced beets (I had one. Two or three would be better!)
- about half an onion, diced and sauteed until limp (I sauteed mine with the onion for the soup and then just removed it from the pot when I was ready to move on with the soup recipe)
- 15 mint leaves, sliced very thinly
- 2 ounces crumbled goat cheese (we are kind of obsessed with Trader Joe's crumbled goat cheese. It kick's feta's rear end!)*
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- 2 teaspoons grainy dijon mustard (we use Trader Joe's here...it is hearty and very tasty)
- salt to taste
- fresh baby spinach (I used about half a bag for the two of us)

- First, whip up the vinagrette: whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, mustard and salt.
- Now combine the lentils, beets, sauteed onion, mint and goat cheese in a bowl. Toss with the vinagrette and serve over the spinach. Voila!

I didn't get a photo of this one, but it was tasty. It would have been nice with some quartered cherry tomatoes or even some crumbled up bacon in it as well.

All in all, what began as a lack of inspiration turned into a hearty, really tasty dinner.

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend! We have a busy one, full of field trips, racing and one amazing looking lunch. I'll tell you all about it on Monday!

* Although Trader Joe's goat cheese offerings aren't organic, they do have a few amazing things that just make me want to take crackers with me to the store. We are especially in love with the aforementioned crumbled goat cheese, the goat's milk brie and the goat's milk cream cheese. I can eat the last one with a spoon, but it is perhaps at it's best paired with some honey and served on a piece of toast...or in a date. Mmmmmmmm.