Vegan MoFo 21: A Bit Rambly

I very suddenly got calls to do a lot of work over very few days, but I think I've done well by MoFo. I tried to line up MoFo posts, and keep them a bit simple too. I'm out of material that I can preload, so this is a little disjointed. I'll come back next week though with all kinds of great foods that I ate over the weekend!

One thing I mentioned the other day was Rutabaga Fries, which my sister turned me onto a few years back. I've never had them any other way though, now that I think about it. Anyway, I sliced them up and tossed them with olive oil, nutritional yeast, and salmon seasoning. Then I baked them for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees. I would like to work on getting them crispier, to be better stand-ins for French fries. I don't know if they're better for you than French fries, but I'm going to go with yes.

These are really great, if a little unusual tasting. I ate them with left over collards for one breakfast, and felt very full.

In other attempts at easy, I stumbled upon what is now one of my favorite meals ever. I had some leftover chickpeas and roasted sweet potatoes. I cooked up some barley, and added it to those two. I topped with coconut oil, powdered garlic, nutritional yeast, and hot sauce. I'm not kidding, this is a top 10 dish right here.

I had no plans to mention this post-work snack here, so I took the picture after I'd already started eating.

One other byproduct of the crazy work week was some excellent staging. I am no stranger to multiple job sites and functions in one day, so I'm good at planning and packing, but one day this week was a 14 hour one between three sites. So i had to come up with and pack a day's worth of food one evening. Granted, for most of the day I was working near One World Cafe, which has awesome vegan options, but I'm trying to save money. Besides, I had supplies from the farmer's market, either in raw or leftover form.

So this is what I came up with: rutabaga fries and collards for breakfast, green smoothie for snack one, Sweet Potato, Roasted Red Pepper, and Corn Bisque with corn bread for lunch, Brazil nuts with dried figs for snack two, and a dragon bowl for dinner. Naturally, I packed it all into my Ask Me Why I'm Vegan bag so that I could grab it and go in the morning.

I'm really quite good at packing lunches. I do recognize that this is pure boasting, but marathon I thought I'd be completing turned into a train-wreck and all of my staging was for naught, so give me this one at least.

Vegan MoFo 18: Sweet Potato, Roasted Red Pepper, and Corn Bisque

Don't be mad, I did say I'd just go ahead and make all the soups in 500 Vegan Recipes, so this is another one of those. However, this soup was a surprising departure from the pattern.

It took over an hour to make. Well, it only took a few minutes to get on the stove, but it had to simmer for an hour. I've been spoiled by quick soups. This was worth it though - thick, spicy, and filling. I didn't even use the called for 2 cups of creamer - I'm not rich or something. I just used two cups of coconut milk beverage. I did opt for the extra chipotle pepper, and I could feel the heat.

Another keeper! Maybe I should rank these soups at the end of the month.

Oh and I learned something while doing the shopping for this. If you buy roasted red peppers packed in water in a jar from the sort-of Italian section of the grocery store, you're going to pay about three times as much as you will if you get "Fancy Pimientos" from what my grocery calls the "Hispanic Foods" section.

In my experience, the same is true for anything you can get in an "ethnic" foods section. Red lentils are fancy eating in one isle, and cheap Indian fare in another. I have a love/hate relationship with the politics and economics of that fact, but I think it's just one more reason to encourage people to save money and eat better by exploring traditional meals that are made of actual foods when they are able.

Vegan Mofo 13: Fig Lentil Soup

I almost skipped this one from 500 Vegan Recipes because it meant an expensive side trip to Whole Foods for dried figs, but my always-intrepid better half reminded me that it's not that big of a deal.

And as it turned out, Safeway had dried figs that were even on sale!

Out of the soups I've made in the past week, this was the most complicated as it called for two pots and had the longest ingredient list. Even still, soup is just easy, so this was no big deal to make. "Complicated" is a gross overstatement.

Listen, there are only so many ways that I can say that the stuff I make tastes good, and so I keep writing that dishes were great or delicious. This soup barely survived the night. I had to hide a portion quickly for my lunch today because it was just so delicious. It was a little spicy and a little sweet, depending on what was in each spoonful. I might have to make more today.

The recipe has you make a soup and a fig spread, but doesn't explicitly tell you how to combine them. For the first bowls, I tossed a spoonful of spread in each, but after the first bite, I realized that the figs would be even better if given a moment to mingle, so I stirred all of the spread into the pot. I figured seconds would be even better ... and they were!

However this soup really knocked it out of the park as breakfast. I had the portion I'd squirreled away, and the resting time allowed the flavors to mingle. Every bite tasted savory like tomato and rosemary, and sweet like figs! I would definitely suggest this as a holiday dinner soup. I might make a tureen of it to haul to my parents' place, where my sisters will be making a gluten-free holiday meal.