Meatless Monday: chickpea and vegetable soup

Soup, pre-mulching

As of the last fortnight we've started menu planning in an attempt to reduce our grocery bill, which has increased by about 50 percent in the last two years. Part of this involves attempting to use stuff from the fridge, freezer and pantry rather than buying lots of new ingredients each week. Obviously the effectiveness of that will reduce as our stockpile does, but it's working quite well so far. So it was that during last week's planning session I decided we needed to eat something involving lots of chickpeas, and concocted said soup. I used:

2 tins of chickpeas, including the liquid from one tin
Two and a bit large carrots, sliced thinly
A few bits of floppy celery from the fridge, sliced thinly
1 large white potato, chopped
Half a red onion, diced
Half a teaspoon of minced garlic
A sprig of rosemary
500ml vegetable stock
A slosh of milk

1. Saute the onion, celery, carrots and garlic in a bit of oil in a big saucepan.
2. Add the potato, stock, chickpeas plus juice and rosemary, crank up the heat and cook until the vegetables are soft (20-30 minutes?). I took the rosemary out after about 10 minutes thinking the flavour might be overpowering but next time I probably wouldn't bother. Next time I do it I might use cumin and ginger instead of rosemary.
3. Add the milk and mulch with a hand blender.
4. We had it served with a bit of plain yoghurt, plus toast.

Not souper glamorous, haha, but nutritious and tasty and fed two people with leftovers for probably less than $5.

This post is part of the Veggie Mama's Meatless Monday series.

Meatless Monday: lentils, feta and other stuff salad

This was a really good salad improvised after a bit of a rubbish day. It was supposed to involve lentils, pomegrante, feta, mint, parsley and vinaigrette, but when I cut the pomegranates open they were patently unripe (just topping off the day really).

So it wound up involving lentils, fried onion/garlic, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, parsley, mint, feta and vinaigrette. I'm not sure what the originally planned one would have tasted like, but this version was amazing.

We had it with Tasmanian salmon, which was not very vegetarian of us. And it was a Wednesday not a Monday. And I was too hungry to bother taking a photo of it. So you'll have to take my word for it that it was good.

Meatless Monday: grilled vegetable pasta salad

This was a mish-mash of various googled recipes. These ingredients made enough for two adults:

Half a bag of pasta swirls

Handful of mushrooms, sliced

One large spring onion, finely chopped

A bunch of asparagus, cut into pieces

Half a red and half a green capsicum

Half a punnet of cherry tomatoes

Quarter of a zucchini, finely sliced

Handful of basil, shredded

Salad dressing (olive oil, vinegar, teaspoon of mustard, crushed clove of garlic, in jar, shaken)

1. Put the pasta on to cook.

2. Fry the mushrooms and spring onion together with some garlic in olive oil until the mushrooms are cooked.

3. Grill the zucchini until soft and grill the capsicum until blackened. I grilled the zucchini in a frypan and blackened the capsicum directly over the stove flame which was a bit of a pain but effective. You could also do both jobs at once on the barbeque but I couldn't be bothered turning it on. Run the capsicum under cold water, then rub the skin off and finely slice the flesh.

4. Throw the cherry tomatoes whole into a dry frypan until they get a few brown/black spots and soften. Then cut them in half. 

5. Lightly steam/boil/microwave the asparagus. It occurs to me now that it might have been worth turning the barbeque on as I could have done the asparagus, mushrooms and tomatoes on it as well as the capsicum and zucchini, although I think you would need to be careful not to burn/overcook various components.

6. Throw everything together in a big bowl, including the salad dressing and basil, stir well, serve.

Meatless Monday: Gazpacho

It's been so hot here than anything we can eat that doesn't require cooking is a winner.

So here is a probably-not-that-authentic version of gazpacho.

750 grams of the best tomatoes you can find

Half a long cucumber

Half a red onion

Half a big red capcisum

Two slices of stale bread, soaked in cold water for 20 minutes

2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar

150ml of olive oil

Coriander

Mint

Salt, pepper

1. Score crosses in the tomatoes, then cover them in boiling water for a few minutes, remove skins and roughly chop.

2. Roughly chop all the other vegies.

3. Blitz everything in a food processor/blender.

 4. You will wind up with a very unattractive looking mush that does not appear at all soup-like. Strain it through a sieve, pushing down on it to get all the juice out.

5. Finely chop coriander, mint and extra cucumber to use as garnish.

6. Refrigerate for several hours and serve cold.

If I was doing this again I would use a quarter of an onion rather than half as I don't much like strongly onion flavoured foods. Some recipes I looked at used a few cloves of garlic rather than onion wihch might also improve things. I made this after E had gone to bed one night, thinking it would be a quick meal, but the the straining took a lot longer than I expected and rather than waiting for it to chill in the fridge we went with a few bogan ice cubes in each bowl. And so much for a meal that didn't require cooking; we wound up eating a few bowls of this as first course followed up by a healthy main of oven chips as the soup isn't really substantial enough to count as dinner on its own. That being said, it tastes fantastic and is worth the effort.

Linking up with the Veggie Mama's Meatless Mondays.

Meatless Mondays: creamy pumpkin pasta

 I've been lurking around on Veggie Mama's blog every Monday enjoying the cache of vegetarian recipes. We are far from being vegetarian at our house, but I do love vegetables of all varieties, and we have a number of vegetarian friends and relatives, so a good veggie-friendly recipe is always handy.

I'm not going to commit to eating vegetarian every Monday as we probably manage meat free meals about twice a week anyway, but I will try to post a meat free recipe each Monday even if it was consumed some other day. Here is my first attempt - creamy pumpkin pasta. It's not particularly decorative, but it creates an instant party in your mouth. Promise.

Creamy pumpkin pasta

The amounts here are very approximate as I didn't measure. I googled a few different versions of similar recipes, and then just used what we had.

500gm butternut pumpkin

1 tbspn olive oil

1/2 cup of cream

2/3 cup of full fat milk

A clove of garlic

The leaves from three or four sprigs of thyme

Grated parmesan cheese

A handful of chopped parsley

1. Cut the pumpkin into chunks, toss them in the olive oil and put them on an oven tray. Mine were probably about 2.5x1.5cm but it doesn't really matter how big they are, except that bigger bits will take longer to cook. Bake them in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes, or longer if necessary, until very soft and a bit brown.

 3. Whizz the pumpkin into mush using a hand blender or food processor.

4. Put the cream, milk, garlic and thyme in a saucepan on low heat. You want it to boil but not crust over or curdle, so stir it frequently. Let it boil for maybe one minute then turn the heat right down.

5. Add the mushed pumpkin to the saucepan and stir it all together. Then blend it again so it makes a smooth sauce.

6. That's it. Serve it on pasta, with some grated parmesan and parsley. If I were writing a real chef-ly recipe I would have told you at some appropriate point to boil the water and cook the pasta, but you can figure that out, can't you?

 7. Eat it for dinner. Yum! If you are game you can try serving it to your toddler, but mine sent it straight back and demanded cheesy pasta for about the tenth time this week. I wasn't entirely unhappy with that as it meant there were leftovers. Yum!