Pumpkin Granola

Happy Fall! I kicked off the season with a baking spree this weekend.  First on my list was pumpkin granola.  I've made granola before, using nuts and fruit and all kinds of delicious--but expensive--ingredients.  This recipe, from Two Peas and Their Pod, is very simple and inexpensive, and, unlike many recipes, pretty healthy! 

First, mix together the wet ingredients: pumpkin, applesauce, maple syrup, and vanilla.

Then, mix together the dry ingredients: oats, spices, salt, and sugar.

Next, pour the wet ingredients over the dry and mix together until moistened. 

Fingers make great mixers. This would be a lot of fun for a little kid.

Spread out the mixture on a foil or wax paper lined baking sheet and bake in a warm (325 degrees) oven for 40 minutes, mixing up the granola half way through baking. 

The granola should be starting to get crispy.  Don't worry if it is still moist, it will dry out and gain some crunch as it cools.  Stir in dried cranberries, and let cool completely.

This granola is great.  It's easy to make, healthy, and inexpensive.  What more could you want?  Oh, and it tastes awesome.  I plan to eat it with yogurt, but so far I've been too busy eating it out of the jar. 

French Onion Soup

In my very first blog post, I told I story about eating homemade French onion soup in Paris.  Since I no longer eat very much meat, I decided to make a vegetarian version, completely from scratch.

Here you can see my ingredients: 3 onions,  butter, and homemade vegetable broth (see post here), plus Swiss cheese and French bread to go on top.  The first step to making French onion soup is to prepare  the onions by slicing them thinly.

Next, place the butter in a large sauce pan and let it melt.  Add the onions. Don't worry, they will condense down.

Cook the onions until they start to brown.  I think this process took almost an hour. When they are ready they should look like this:

Then, add the vegetable broth.  I added one quart of homemade vegetable broth. My soup ended up very thick, so I would recommend adding a little more broth.  My broth was very flavorful already, but feel free to add some spices at this point, to your taste.

Let the soup simmer for about twenty minutes.  The longer you cook it, the more the flavor will develop.  I found that the soup was much better the second day, after the flavors had time to meld in the fridge overnight.

Either way, here comes the best part of French onion soup. Pour your desired serving size into an oven-proof bowl.  Place a slice of French bread and Swiss cheese on top.  Then, put the entire bowl into the oven and broil on high for just a minute.  The soup will come out with a nice gooey cheesy bread on top.  Voila, that's how you make French onion soup....from start to finish!

Broccoli and Seitan with Black Bean Sauce

Going out to eat as a vegetarian or vegan can be very difficult.  While lots of foods appear to be meat-free, many are cooked in a meat-based broth.  This week I decided to make my own vegan broccoli and seitan with black bean sauce, inspired by one of my favorite Chinese dishes: chicken with black bean sauce.  The recipe for this dish was adapted from CookingLight Way to Cook Vegetarian's Seitan Stir-Fry with Black Bean Garlic Sauce.

My first step was to mix together the sauce: water, rice wine, flour, and store-bought black bean garlic sauce. After I set this aside, I stir fried a package (8oz) of seitan in oil.

After the seitan started to brown, I removed it from the pan and added garlic, ginger, and broccoli to the pan, which I cooked until the broccoli was no longer crunchy. 

Then, I added back in the sauce and seitan and cooked until heated through.  That's all it took!  This stir fry was awesome.  It had great flavor and was super easy to put together, thanks to the prefab black bean sauce. I served it with brown rice to create a well-balanced dinner, complete with protein (seitan has a ton!), complex carbs, and vegetables. Yum yum yum. It was also great for lunch the next two days.  Have you ever tried seitan?

Gnocchi

In my limited experience, gnocchi is typically served in fancy Italian restaurants with a creamy sauce.  Many people think that because of this, gnocchi is expensive and difficult to make.  That couldn't be farther from the truth.  Gnocchi is made from just three ingredients that you probably already have in your kitchen:  potatoes, flour, and eggs.  This recipe, which made enough for 6 or 8 servings, cost under 5 dollars to make.

The first step in making gnocchi is to peel potatoes.  The number of potatoes depends on how much gnocchi you want to make.

Next, cut the potatoes into chunks and boil them, as if you were making mashed potatoes. The smaller you cut the potatoes, the faster they will cook. 

Then, mash the potatoes.  I went old school and used a fork, but a potato masher or ricer would work well too. 

Once the potatoes are sufficiently mashed, the next step is to form a dough.  To do so, mix the mashed potatoes with flour and egg.  Again, this recipe is easily adaptable to large quantities, so the amount of flour and number of eggs depends on how many mouths you want to feed. 

I mixed up my dough on the counter using my hands.  This seemed to be the easiest method. As you can see, two potatoes makes a lot of dough.  Once the dough is formed, roll it out into long skinny rods.   The gnocchi expands a little while cooking, so make the rods slightly smaller than your intended gnocchi thickness. 

Cut the rod into sections that are a little less than an inch long.  Then, to get the special gnocchi shape, gently press a fork into the dough forming ridges. 

The gnocchi are now ready to be cooked.  Start a pot of water boiling on the stove and prepare an ice bath for the gnocchi. 

In small batches, toss the gnocchi into the boiling water.  They cook remarkably fast, in just a few minutes.  Once they float to the surface they are cooked.  Place them into the ice bath to prevent further cooking.

Repeat this process until the dough has all become gnocchi. Two potatoes create a lot of pasta. The gnocchi do freeze well, so feel free to make extra for later.  

Does the simplicity of this recipe surprise you?  Will you still spend $20 at a restaurant for a plate of potatoes and flour?  I don't think I will...

Here I served the gnocchi in a homemade pesto sauce--recipe coming soon!

Roasted Tomato Sauce

 

Towards the end of summer, my dad's garden always has an overabundance of ripe tomatoes.  He dropped off about 20 at my apartment and the only way I could think of using them up was to make some tomato sauce.  I made two kinds: a rustic roasted tomato sauce and a more sophisticated tomato sauce with white wine.  Here I'll present the roasted tomato sauce. I used eight tomatoes for this sauce.

First I cut the tomatoes into one inch chunks.

 

Then I mixed up fresh basil, olive oil, and garlic...  

 

...and tossed it with the chopped tomatoes.

 

Next I roasted the herbed tomatoes in a warm (325 degrees) oven for about two hours. After two hours, I increased the heat to 400 degrees and cooked them for another half hour.  The roasting instructions came from Alton Brown's recipe here. 

 

Once the tomatoes were nice and roasted, starting to get crisp around the edges, I let them cool.  To turn the tomatoes into the sauce, I blended them using my stick blender.  I left a few tomato chunks to give the sauce a rustic feel.  Though this picture is pretty blah, this sauce was awesome.  It made enough for one meal of pasta and broccoli shown above and an extra quart that I froze for later, when fresh garden tomatoes are no longer available.

Sweet Potato and Beet Hash Browns

 

With the rest of my beets, I decided to make beet hash browns.  Again, here I essentially treated the beets as potatoes, and actually mixed them with some sweet potatoes.  I started with one sweet potato and two beets:

 

To make the hash browns, I chopped the potatoes and beets into approximately 1/2 inch pieces and sauted them in a pan with olive oil, onion, salt and pepper until soft.

I ate them with fried eggs.  These sweet potato and beet hash browns were heavier than normal potato hash browns, but had a ton of visual interest and interesting texture.  I thought this was a great way to use up some beets.  But beware, this makes a lot of food. Hope you're hungry!

Oven roasted beets

Earlier in the summer my aunt gave me some beets from the farmers market.  I had never eaten beets before, much less cooked them, so I searched around the internet for some recipes.  My first beet treat was oven roasted beets.  Basically, I pretended that I was making oven roasted potatoes but used beets instead.  Here are the four golden beets I used, already trimmed.

 

When I cut them open I noticed that they had really neat designs on the inside, kind of ling the rings on an old tree:

I sliced the beets into chunks that were approximately 1" big.  Then I tossed them in olive oil, cumin, and cayenne pepper and baked them in the oven.

 

The beets turned out nice and crisp, just like oven roasted potatoes should.  They were quite tasty--like potatoes, but a little earthier, with more flavor.  I assume more nutrients too, but I haven't looked that one up...