Food, Glorious Food!

Chipotle Split Pea Soup


I made this soup for the first time last week on Wednesay - it's a great recipe to start hours before you want to eat it, but basically just start it and forget about it until you're hungry. I got this from PETA's 2 Week Sample Menu. I served this with some Corn-Rye Muffins from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. They were pretty good, too! Very hearty; the only sweetener is molasses.

Chipotle Split-Pea Soup
Chipotle is a smoked jalapeño that adds a smoky flavor without the ham hock.

2 cups dried split peas
8 cups boiling water
1 medium-size onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 carrots, sliced diagonally
1⁄2 cup chopped parsley (didn't have any, was fine without)
1 tsp. finely cut chipotle
1 Tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce (used Braggs)
(I also added a few drops of Liquid Smoke for extra hammy-smokiness.)

Simmer the split peas in the boiling water for approximately 1 hour, until soft.

Add the remaining ingredients and continue boiling until the vegetables are tender, adding more water as needed.

Makes 10 servings - Maybe in some other universe, but not ours! I think maybe 6 is more reasonable.

This Week's Vegan Pizza


This week's vegan pizza consists of a whole wheat crust, organic tomato sauce, sundried-tomatoes, roasted red peppers, roasted garlic and corn with one packet of Mozarella style Chreese. So good!

Winter PeachBerry Crisp

I've been following (aka lurking) on the Frugal Meal Planning 101 thread over at MDC. Someone on there asked what to do with canned fruit, like peaches. Another smarty-pants mom replied that she used them to make crisps and cobblers. It was like a lead anvil fell on my head. DUH! Of course! Why hadn't I ever thought of this before!?! We have like 10 mason jars of peaches in our pantry (long story) and we've been trying to make our way through them, but seriously there are only so many peaches you can eat for breakfast. So I'm sooooo glad I found this idea!

This crisp contains peaches, part of a bag of frozen blackberries and like 1/4 cup of a bag of mixed frozen berries. I added some flour to the fruit, and put it in the pie pan. Covered it up with the Crisp Topping from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - and there you have it, bliss in a pie pan. So delicious! Does this count as one of my daily servings of fruit?

Chili Transformed with a side of Food Poisoning?

We had an overly exciting weekend here. Chad fell down the stairs Thursday night and dislocated his shoulder. Then this weekend, he got pretty violently ill all day Sunday (started Saturday night). Silas also got sick - he puked all over the bed Saturday night and has had some unusual baby business out the other end as well (for him). Anyway, tmi, but what's weird is that both of them would be sick and yet I had NO SYMPTOMS whatsoever. Silas is only breastfeeding, so he had to have gotten it through me, right? Chad and I ate exactly the same things on Saturday, only I ate some additional stuff that he didn't have. It's so strange.

Anyway, one of the things we both ate was this chili that I made from leftover Pintos from last weekend, celery, carrots, green bell pepper, onion and spices. We ate it with Tortilla chips instead of spoons, mmmm. But now we're afraid to eat it because of The Illness. Oh well.

Flax and Sunflower Seed Bread (bread machine)

We made this fantastic recipe for the second time this weekend. Let me tell you, coming home to your house filled with the smells of baking bread after a long morning of errands - heavenly! I'm really loving the bread machine lately - we haven't bought bread in well over a month.

Recipe (from Allrecipes.com)

• 1 1/3 cups water
• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 3 tablespoons honey
• 1 1/2 cups bread flour
• 1 1/3 cups whole wheat bread flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup flax seeds
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds

Place all ingredients (except sunflower seeds) in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select basic white cycle; press start. Add the sunflower seeds when the alert sounds during the knead cycle. (Note: I use the "Sweet Cycle" on my bread machine and add the sunflower seeds when it beeps. I also use the Allrecipe feature to reduce the serving size from 15 to 9, because our bread machine is a little smaller than most.)

Homemade Veggie Stock


Yep, another side project of the weekend was transforming our odds and ends of vegetables into stock. This included a piece of onion, greens from leeks, some "mature" cilantro, some wrinkled grape tomatoes, some shrivelly parsnips, a carrot, and some older red potatoes. Oh and some odd tops/ends of carrots and onions, too. I love making stock! It's so awesome to make something useful and delicious with stuff that normal people might throw in the trash. I want to try to make some either weekly or bi-weekly, depending on how much stocking veggies I generate.

That's all for now!