Tomato and Barley Risotto

I recently discovered an extremely elegant vegetarian blog called The New Vegetarian on the The Guardian website.  And I'm always on the lookout for an alternative risotto like the cauliflower one I had at this amazing New York restaurant.  So while browsing through all of Yotam's beautiful recipes, I found this one, and it was going to make a perfect 5th course at my upcoming dinner party.  However, I really only used the recipe for inspiration, as I left out the sugar, feta and coriander, and added spinach and delicata squash.  And I only used 12 cloves of garlic, not TWO WHOLE HEADS like the recipe calls for.  Is he crazy?  I would have to stay in solitary confinement for a week.

Carrot Fennel Soup

I've been making the same curried carrot soup for so long that almost everyone I know has had it.  So I thought I would mix it up when I had my in-laws over for dinner.  I had a bunch of fennel in the fridge so I figured I would either make a fennel salad or soup.  Then the oven broke, and I needed another hot course, so that was that.  I was going to wing it, which has never done me wrong with soup, but then I found a Gourmet recipe and followed it (mostly.)  I added an apple I had laying around and I didn't bother making the fennel seed oil.  I used pumpkin seed oil I already had instead.  And a little sprinkle of paprika to top it all off.

Stuffed Tomato and Delicata Squash

Simple to make Sunday dinner. I wanted to make "Baked eggs in Tomatoes" but the husband is weird about eggs, so I swapped out the egg for a rice and mushroom mixture. I chose those because that's what I had in the fridge. You could stuff it with anything though. The delicata squash only appears for a few weeks every fall, so every year I mess with the recipe a little more. Serve these separately or together with a salad (frisee and arugala shown here.)

For the tomato:
Sautee mixed mushrooms with diced onion and garlic, mix with a little parmesan and cooked brown rice and set aside.
Cut off top and hollow out the tomato of all liquid and seeds. Then sprinkle the inside with salt.
Stuff tomato tightly with rice and mushrooms and place on oiled baking sheet.

For the squash:
Halfway mash some white beans with some finely chopped spinach and ricotta cheese. You could mix in an egg, but it's not essential.
Halve the squash and scrape out seeds. Pack in the bean mixture and top with panko breadcrumbs. Place on baking sheet.

Bake either or both at 400 degrees until tops are brown.

ONE jalapeno harvest

One jalapeno plant produces far more peppers than one person can possibly use. I picked a bag this big at least 4 times this summer. Most of the time I would just use one per night for dinner. I also did some jalapeno vodka infusions. But the bulk of them are going to my friends Bridget and Brian so they can make more of their delicious hotsauce, with which I liberally top most of my meals.

Tempeh Cakes

I have been obsessed with Terrene's tempeh cakes for some time now. These ones were almost as good. I served them with brussels sprouts and mashed butternut squash and spuds. It's also super easy to make if you are willing to be a little carefree with your recipe. You could pretty much use any vegetables (corn, peppers, olives) or herbs (nori, basil, oregano, sage) and steer the flavour in whatever direction you wanted i.e. southwestern, Mediterranean, Asian. I think I steered the flavour in a sort of home-style direction.

Ingredients:
I pack tempeh
3-4 ribs celery diced
1 large carrot diced
1 large dollop of vegan or normal mayonaise
1 T wholegrain mustard
1 1/2 cup Panko breadcrumbs
1 T minced parsley and thyme
salt and pepper

Directions:
Reserve breadcrumbs, celery and carrots and place all other ingredients in blender and blend until almost smooth. If mixture is too thick, add a little olive oil. Transfer blended mixture to a mixing bowl and stir in reserved ingredients (reserving half the breadcrumbs.) Form mixture into cakes and dredge in remaining breadcrumbs. Place cakes on oiled baking sheet and bake at 425 until both sides are lightly browned. These can also be pan fried if you prefer.

Vegetarian Cassoulet

So I'm not going to lie and act like I made this up out of my head. Never let it be said that I don't give credit where it is due! I've never even had a regular cassoulet so I had nothing to draw from. The husband has been requesting I try to make a vegetarian one for over a year, so I used this recipe from Gourmet magazine. I did add some Field Roast sausages though, because I knew I would hear about it if I didn't. I served it with roasted brussels sprouts and toasted wheat bread with my guilty pleasure - provel cheese. Sorry about the unattractive squareness of it.

Last Caprese Salad of Tomato Season

A Vom Fass recently opened here. They sell all kinds of delicious vinegars and oils and I am like a kid in a candy store there. You can taste anything before you buy it, and it is physically impossible to walk out of there without a bottle of Maletti balsamic vinegar after you've tasted it. It is easily three times as thick as normal balsamic and the flavour is unreal. It made our caprese salads that much more wonderful this summer. Since my stupid tomato plants didn't do anything all summer but take up space, the tomatoes you see here are courtesy of the Amish farmers at TGFM.

Mini Savoury Pots

Lentil Pie
While teaching in Co. Cavan at this years Scoil Eigse, I had the pleasure to inhabit and dine at the Cavan Crystal hotel for 8 days. The default vegetarian entree was a puy lentil pie. It was delicious and I had it three nights in a row before I asked if the chef might mix it up a bit for me. The only thing I changed was using sweet potatoes instead of normal ones. Either way it's yummy.

Ingredients:
1 sweet potato peeled, boiled and mashed with some yogurt and herbs
1/2 cup puy lentils fully cooked
1/2 yellow onion sauteed until brown

Mix lentils and onions and pack tightly into bottom half of a ramekin. Top with mashed potato and bake until lightly browned on top.


Oyster Mushrooms Rockafeller
I ripped the idea for this recipe off from the Vegetarian Times. But their recipes aren't always authentic enough for me, so I looked up a recipe for Oysters Rockafeller, and switched in the oyster mushrooms for the oysters. I like when nature provides the perfect substitute for a non-veg item. Sort of like the lentils are for ground beef.

Farmers Market Dinners

Here are two dinners I made out almost exclusively out of stuff I bought at the market in the park accross the street. They aren't rocket science; just a bunch of sauteed vegetables really; both served with polenta two different ways.
Zucchini, tatsoi, yellow tomato, smoked eggplant, carrots, smoked onions, and polenta cakes coated in panko and baked. Thanks to Bridget for the photo styling! The limes were for drinks.


The corn didn't make the cut for this particular dish, but it was delicious. Precious precious sungold tomatoes, chantrelles and shitakes from ozark forest mushrooms, patty pan squash, kalamata olives, chinese broccoli, pumpkin blossoms stuffed with taleggio cheese on a bed of herbed polenta.

Slightly Out of Control Pumpkin Patch

One halloween pumpkin left to rot on side of house = yard full of pumpkins!

Chilled Spicy Cucumer and Avocado Soup

It is crazy hot out, so much so that the thermostat is ten degrees behind itself. So I had the girls over for dinner for some wine and summery food. Rebecca shown here accenting the soup with her awesome shirt.

2 cucumbers - peeled and seeded
2 avocados - chopped
3 cups water
2 tsp. green curry paste
1 serrano pepper - seeded
10 oz. coconut milk
juice of 1 lime
salt and pepper to taste
cilantro and finely chopped green onion for garnish

Put each ingredient in blender in order until fully blended. Place soup in fridge and chill for at least an hour. Handiest to store it in a pitcher for serving ease.

Smoky Spicy Fava Bean Dip

I recently purchased a stove top smoker and I've been smoking everything I can get my hands on since. I've also got a cherry tomato and jalapeno plant that won't quit, so I have to keep making up recipes that include them. And I'm constantly looking for ways to reinvent hummus, so that's how this recipe came about.

6 cherry tomatoes - halved and smoked
1/2 yellow onion - smoked
3 smoked jalapenos de-stemmed and de-seeded
1 can fava beans - rinsed and drained
1 generous handful cilantro
2 T Braggs liquid aminos
1 t tumeric - just because this might be true

Salad Towers

After my gig at the farmer's market near my house, I bought a few treats for myself and incorporated them all into one dinner, the second course of which I forgot to photograph before I gobbled it. It was whole wheat rotini with fresh chanterelle mushrooms and a light garlic cream sauce. The first course was this salad:

1 large yellow patty pan squash - sliced in 1/8 inch slices and sauteed until lightly browned

1 smoked or carmelized onion sliced - i did smoked

1 homegrown tomato sliced

1 head bibb lettuce

bleu cheese - melted into more of a sauce if you like

black pepper and sea salt

balsamic vinegar (optional)

layer them in the following order - lettuce leaf, tomato slice, squash slice, cheese - then sprinkle the onions all around.

Tempeh Cakes at Terrene

Terrene is one of my favorite restaurants in St. Louis, partially because they always have one reliably delicious vegetarian entree, and partially because the staff there are so sweet and friendly that the dining experience is enhanced by their presence.

These tempeh cakes knocked my socks off! They are smokey, savoury, sweet all at the same time. I think about them all the time now. I am working on getting the chef to give me his recipe. Go eat at Terrene! They will not overload you with butter and salt. And you might just eat something that you can't find ANYWHERE ELSE IN TOWN!

Mashed Frites with Seitan and Mushrooms and Backyard greens

This one was inspired by one of the courses we had at an "underground dinner" a few weeks ago. Now while I found that whole experience culinarily underwhelming, I did particularly enjoy this dish, especially since it was family style and I was able to sneak lots of extra morels onto my plate. This is about as "home cookin" as vegetarian food can get.

Ingredients:

3 large potatoes, boiled skins on

1 cup plain greek yogurt

1 T butter

1 handful parsley

salt and pepper

---------------------

1 cup seitan

4 cups shitake mushrooms (or morel if you are lucky)

garlic

shallots

white wine

butter

a pinch or two of flour (optional)

----------------------

1 large bunch of your favorite greens

splash of apple cider vinegar

1 t honey

raw veg salad

Inspired by a perfect "fatoosh" salad at The Vine, my favorite local Middle Eastern eatery, I went to the Tower Grove Farmers Market this morning and bought the ingredients for this simple salad. All local and all delicious. It's easy, and you can put in basically anything. Just dice it all up!

Ingredients:

2 tomatoes

1 small red onion

1 zucchini

2 ears corn

1 lemon (juice of)

1 handful parsley

1 handful basil

salt and pepper to taste

A few greens for dinner

I have three large pots in my garden, each with five plants crammed in them. Here you see a ONE DAY harvest of buttercrunch lettuce, rainbow chard, and kale. The lettuce is especially bountiful and I've been making a huge salad every day. All those greens look like a lot when raw, but it took every bit of what you see here to fill my deep pie plate for a crustless quiche I made and forgot to photograph. I can't believe I never grew these before. It's the easiest thing ever. But you will have to wait until early April if you want your own. Greens growing season is drawing to a close.

Lentil Barley Stuffed Peppers

This is not rocket science, but tastes so good and hearty. This is the kind of thing I wish local restaurant chefs would dream up for vegetarians. It is a focal point that you can pair with vegetable sides! If all you can think of is pasta and stir-fry then you fail the assignment! Anyway, enough of my rant.....

Ingredients:

1 cup green lentils

1 cup purple barley (or regular barley)

1 red onion chopped

2 eggs

1 t chopped thyme

truffle oil to taste

As many peppers as you want

Equal # pieces of your favorite sliced cheese - I used provel because I am addicted to it.

salt and pepper to taste

olive oil

Cook the lentils and barley separately. Fluff the barley and drain the lentils and transfer into large mixing bowl. Sautee onion until it begins to carmelize. Add the thyme and sautee for 1 more minute. Transfer onions to bowl with lentils and barley. Add eggs, salt, pepper and truffle oil and mix thoroughly.

Cut the tops off peppers and set aside. Using your hands, grab as much of the seed cluster as you can. If necessary, go in with a knife and clean out the rest of the seeds and white fibrous bits. Set pepper cups close together in either an oiled deep baking dish or loaf pan. Pack lentil mixture inside pepper cups until completely full. Put tops of peppers back on top and bake for 30 mins at 425. Remove pepper tops and replace with 1 slice of cheese per pepper. Broil until cheese is brown and/or bubbly. Serve with salad, asparagus, or anything you want!

Spinach and Bean Empanadas

Empanadas are delicious, but they are never vegetarian at restaurants for some reason. Why is that when these are so easy and obvious?

1 10oz pack of frozen spinach, thawed and drained

1 large onion diced

5 cloves garlic

1 can beans rinsed and drained

1 egg, hard boiled and chopped

queso fresco (or any cheese) to taste

salt and pepper to taste

1 package GOYA "tapas para empanadas" - (lazy, i know)

Saute onion and garlic, then mix with remaining ingredients in large bowl.

Place one tablespoon of filling in center of each dough disc. Lightly wet the edges with water using finger tips. Fold in half and seal edges by pressing together with a fork. Bake for around 10 mins at 350 or until golden brown. You can also fry them if you're in that kind of mood.

Serve with your choice of yummy sauces. Tomatillo chipotle salsa and mexican crema shown here.

Vegetarian Passover Dishes

The Torah instructs a Jew not to eat chometz all seven
days of Passover. "Chometz" is defined as any of the five grains (wheat, spelt, barley, oats, and rye.) The way around that when you want something starchy? Quinoa! It seems like a grain, but it is actually a member of the beet family.

Enter Greens and Quinoa Pie!

1 c. Quinoa rinsed and drained

1 10 oz. pack of frozen spinach (thawed but not drained)

1 large onion chopped and sauteed.

1/2 c. fresh herbs chopped

1/4 c. goat cheese

1/2 c. plain greek yogurt

3 eggs beaten

salt and pepper to taste

Oil a deep pie plate with olive oil. Mix all ingredients in large mixing bowl and transfer to oiled pie plate and bake at 350 for 30-40 mins. Easy!

Serve with Tunisian Carrot Salad:

1 lb. baby carrots chopped

20 kalamata olives chopped

sunflower shoots

olive oil

roasted garlic

paprika

cayenne pepper

lemon juice

chopped parsley

Mix it all together and serve either chilled or at room temperature.

Oh, and since I'm not Jewish, I also had a big slice of whole wheat bread with white bean spread on it. Bean spread recipe to follow.