Homemade Vegetable Stock

Last week I opened my cupboard only to be plunked in the head with a bottle of yeast. This week, I’m working on clearing out the winter pantry staples to make room for spring! What better place to start with comfort food than smooth, veggie-rich broth made on your very own stovetop?

Mike is the master of all things slow-cooked; I don’t have the patience for stuff like this. But I get to come home and reap the rewards of his work!

Why make your own vegetable stock?

• It’s cheap
• It uses up the veggies rotting in your fridge
• It’s free from MSG (check your stock cubes or powder - most do contain it)
• It’s delicious
• It’s as low in salt as you want it to be

When we cook, we throw the vegetable scraps into a plastic container in the freezer. Then, when the container is full of potato peels, carrot stubs, and onion ends, we make stock. Then we turn that stock into delicious vegetable soup – generally minestrone, lentil, or barley.

Cooking vegetable soup stock

Homemade Vegetarian Vegetable Stock Recipe

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Cooking time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

• Onion ends
• Potato peelings
• Carrot stubs and peelings
• Celery tops
• Garlic
• Leftover tomatoes (optional)
• Going-bad mushrooms (optional)
• Other vegetables, as desired
• Herbs (if desired, depending on what you’ll use the stock for)
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Directions:

1. Chop the vegetables into pieces of uniform size, if not already done.
2. Optional step – sauté the onions, garlic, celery, and carrots in a touch of olive oil until golden brown.
3. Put the vegetables into a large soup pot.
4. Add water in a ratio of about 1 ½ parts water to 1 part vegetables (for example, if using 2 cups vegetables, add 3 cups water)
5. Heat over high until it reaches a boil.
6. Reduce heat and simmer for about an hour.
7. Remove from heat.
8. Strain stock through a fine sieve or colander. Discard vegetables and use stock for soup.

Cooking vegetable stock

Straining the vegetable stock

Looking for homemade soup recipes?

These are some of our favourites, which also happen to be vegan:

• Winter Tomato Barley Soup 
• Curried Butternut Squash Soup 
• Split Pea Soup

Cooked veggies left over from stock-making

Weekly Wrap: The World of Veg Cuisine for March 18-25, 2011

Recipes

On Veg Cuisine

Lazy lasagne recipe

• Lazy Lasagne Recipe
  It's ricotta-spinach lasagne but without the pain-in-the-tushie layering. 

Elsewhere on the interwebs

• 6 vegetarian lasagna recipes (Homemakers.com).
  Add this to our lazy lasagne recipe and you have enough lasagne choices to last you through to next winter!

News and “but-is-it” news

On Veg Cuisine

• Spring Cleaning the Kitchen
  I’m cleaning out the cupboard with a last round of vegetarian comfort food recipes before the good weather (and spring produce) hits. Send me your favourite recipes!

• A Century of Meat
  The amount of red meat Americans eat is going down, but the amount of chicken is going up. Egg consumption is going down too. Canadians eat only about half of the American amount of meat. Hooray! But the New York Times writer who made this infographic Internet- famous feels bad for eating plants, too.

 Elsewhere

• Sabre-toothed Brazilian veggiesaurus skeleton found
  The remains of an ancient sabre-toothed vegetarian creature were found in Brazil. I’m not sure I agree with using “vegetarian” in this context – did the animal choose not to eat meat? I’d be more inclined to call it an “herbivore”. But either way, these dog-like animals were apparently bad-ass, using their teeth to fight each other instead of to kill prey. Kinda reminds me of those big beefy athletes (the UFC’s Mac Danzig, anyone?) who subsist on plants.
  Story: Remains of ancient saber-toothed vegetarian found in Brazil (CTV News)

Airline food
Photo credit: mailtobee, sxc.hu

• Vegetarian flicks crappy food at flight attendant
  It’s not really news, but for some reason the blogs are all over this one. Those vegetarians are just plain crazy. Probably due to a lack of protein.
  Story: No peas and Q's for raging in-flight veg gal (New York Post)

• Tasty iPhone apps for vegetarians
  I wish I had an iPhone so I could test these apps out and tell you which are the best. But for free or a small fee, you can find out yourself. I can especially see the usefulness of pulling up a list of non-vegetarian ingredients to help you grocery shop. But what’s wrong with a website? Do iPhones not “do” actual websites? Websites are free.
  Story: Tasty iPhone apps for vegetarians (Appolicious)

• Tofurky Tuesdays
  As if there aren’t enough days and weeks to remember (yesterday, tomorrow…no wait, more like Meatless Mondays, Veguary, Soup Sundays…) Tofurky is jumping on the wagon with Tofurky Tuesdays. Who else is sick of other people telling us what to eat? By the way, check out the Veg Cuisine blog for some tasty dinner ideas ;)
  Tofurky.com’s web page: Tofurky Tuesdays

• Are vegetarians smarter?
  I don’t see any references with this The Jakarta Post article, but it’s an interesting perspective nonetheless. Ignore the boring headline and skim down to the part where they talk about IQ’s.
  Story: Teenagers going vegetarian (The Jakarta Post)
  (Also related: Born to be vegan on Asia One Health follows a similar line, describing how meat is toxic. I don’t think most North Americans would take well to reading that in their morning paper). 

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Spring Cleaning the Kitchen

I’m not Martha Stewart. I don’t give my house a top-to-bottom clean in the spring…or ever. But my kitchen is a different story. I can’t cook unless I can find my ingredients.

Over the course of the winter we’ve accumulated layers of canned and packaged comfort foods, ready to become healthy and warming winter meals.

We have dried peas and beans out the wazoo. Soup mixes that’ve been there for years. And rice noodles of every shape and size. 

My baking cupboard is getting to the point where I am forced to duck and cover every time the door is opened, or risk getting plunked in the head by a bottle of quick-rising yeast.
(edit: my bad <3 Mike)

Overstuffed baking goods cupboard

In terms of the fridge, well…have you ever seen so many sauces?

So many sauces

Some would call this a well-stocked kitchen. If I had a pantry like Chef Michael Smith, I might agree (and I wouldn’t be writing this post). But the reality is I have a small city kitchen and a fridge in need of a good clean. But first I need to be able to see the shelves.

Canned goods cupboard

So, over the next few weeks I will be trying my best to embrace the coat-tails of winter and cook up some comfort food to get us through to spring. I know it’s technically spring already, but here’s what I woke up to yesterday morning:

Snowy front yard

Snowy deck

 

If you have any comfort food recipes that rely on pantry staples, feel free to send them my way. I have to clean this stuff out before the spring veggies come into season, or there will be no looking back to winter.

Lazy Lasagne Recipe

Who has time to make proper lasagne? Or rather, who has the patience to make proper lasagne? Not us. So we deconstructed the typical vegetarian lasagne and made it into a baked pasta casserole – no layering, no broken noodles, and no frustration. Just mix and bake.

You could add more vegetables to the spinach mixture in this lasagne, but personally, we think the simpler this recipe stays, the better. If you want more veggies in your meal, try a side dish: maybe a matchstick carrot salad or vegetarian Caesar salad (the Caesar recipe is Mike’s, and it’s pretty much the most delicious recipe ever).

You’ll need a large casserole dish for this recipe, or two smaller ones. If you’re cooking for one or two, try freezing half the recipe. We have lightweight Corningware dishes with freezer-friendly lids for this purpose.

Gooey cheese tops off vegetarian lazy lasagne

Lazy Lasagne Recipe

Makes 6 servings

Preparation + cooking time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 medium cooking onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
• 1 (454 gram) box whole wheat pasta shapes, like penne
• 1 (24 ounce) can plain pasta sauce
• ½ Tbsp. sweet paprika (substitute hot if sweet paprika is not available; use only a few pinches instead)
• 1 tsp. oregano
• 1 tsp. basil
• Salt to taste
• 1 tsp. black pepper
• ½ tub ricotta cheese
• 1 (10 ounce) box frozen spinach
• 1 ½ cups grated mozzarella cheese

Directions:

Put on a large pot of water for the pasta before starting the sauce. When it boils, cook pasta according to package directions. Cook until slightly firm (al dente).

For the sauce:

1. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil.
2. When the oil is hot, add the chopped onions and stir well.
3. Sauté the onions for a few minutes, adding more olive oil if the onions start to burn. Add the minced garlic.
4. Sauté until the onions are translucent and soft. Add the oregano, basil, sweet paprika (use a few pinches of regular paprika if sweet paprika is not available).
5. Add the tomato sauce.
6. Bring the sauce to a boil; add pepper and add salt to taste.
7. Defrost the spinach in the microwave (if frozen) and add to the sauce.
8. Heat through, then remove from heat.
9. Gently pour the sauce into the casserole dish (or split between two dishes, if that’s what you’re doing). Add the pasta (or half the pasta) and stir. Then add the ricotta cheese (or half the ricotta), breaking it up into very small chunks with a fork as you go.
10. Top with shredded mozzarella cheese.
11. Bake at 350 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes, or until top is just started to brown.

A Century of Meat

Infographic: A Century of Meat from NYTimes.com.

How does your meat consumption stack up? Based on this graph, it looks like the typical American eats nearly 200 pounds of meat per year. That's as much as you'd get from an entire full-grown man.

Think Canadians are better? We are: according to statistics from StatsCan, Canadians ate 42.26 kilograms (about 93 pounds) of meat, poultry, and fish in 2009. (However, this number is adjusted for spoilage and other losses.)

What is telling about this graph is how the graph doesn't even blip in most categories during war times. It's a stark contrast to Canada - our first "food rules", as predecessors to the Food Guide, were developed as a "focal point" for nutrition during World War II. Food during the war was scarce and people were poor. The food rules created in 1942 recommended only one serving of meat per day, noting that serving could be substituted with beans, peas, eggs, nuts, or cheese.

And for those of you who saw the link to the infographic but missed the full article, here it is: No Face, but Plants Like Life Too.

A St. Patrick's Day Menu For You

St. Patrick's Day food can be summed up in three words:

• Beer
• Green
• Potatoes

Luckily, there are plenty of vegetarian beers, plenty of green vegetables (skip the food dye, please) and plenty of meatless potato recipes. Celebrate with this Irish-themed menu, perfect for a weekday dinner.

Vegetarian St. Patrick’s Day Menu

Lentil Loaf

Leeks for Colcannon

Emerald soup recipe

While others are mowing down on corned beef, you can enjoy some of the green-speckled potato dish called colcannon. Round out the meal with a tasty lentil loaf (or faux meat of your choosing), emerald soup, and a festive green side dish or two (nothing too onerous – think green peas or salad). 

If you want to save some time on St. Patrick’s Day (eve), cook the lentils and potatoes the night before.

If you're out of cabbage (or just don't like it) substitute kale, leeks, or Savoy cabbage in the colcannon.

The recipes:

 

• Emerald soup (you can leave out the potatoes if you're feeling potato-overwhelmed)
• Colcannon
  
• Lentil loaf 
• Green peas or spring greens salad 

Pancake Tuesday: Join Us in Being Late

Mike's chocolate chip oatmeal pancakes

We nearly forgot it was Shrove Tuesday last week. We're not religious, so I wasn't upset because of any oustanding obligations related to the day. But any time you have a excuse to eat pancakes for dinner, hey, you shouldn't miss it.

So after our workout - about 10 p.m. - Mike set about making some of our famous chocolate chip pancakes.

It's so easy to make pancakes I always wonder why people use a boxed mix. Our recipe is so much more flexible, nutritious (shhhh...it has oatmeal in it) and you control exactly what goes in.

The recipe backbone comes from an old Milk cookbook my mom's had for as long as I can remember. However, I've substituted just about everything possible into (and out of ) the recipe.

Chocolate chip pancakes - the unhealthy version

If you're wiggling in your seat wondering where you can get your hands on this recipe, it's on our recipe site - Vegetarian Cuisine at Suite101.com: Oatmeal Pancakes Recipe.

You can make this recipe:

• Whole wheat: I've successfully used 100% whole wheat flour with the oatmeal. The 'cakes get darker but they taste is still good.
• Vegan: Substitute egg replacer or applesauce for the egg and use soy/non-dairy milk instead of cow's milk. Use non-dairy margarine or oil instead of the butter. The taste difference is imperceptible, but the texture will be heavier.
• Sinful: throw in a handful or two of chocolate chips.
• Healthy: Use whole-wheat flour and substitute applesauce or mushed banana for half the butter. Add blueberries and top with applesauce, juice-sweetened syrup, or jam.

Some people eat pancakes for breakfast. We eat them often - as a snack, breakfast, brunch or dinner. If there are leftovers, I pack them in my lunch with a small tub of syrup for dipping. They keep for a few days, but rarely last that long.

Pancake Tuesday is a great excuse to eat pancakes - but who really needs an excuse?

Vegan Bucket List - Our Score...and Some More

This month's issue of VegNews contains a vegan bucket list - 99 things you must do, eat, and see. We're not vegan, but we've accomplished 17 of these items - well, at least our version (in red).

While most of their suggested activities sound fun (or worthwhile), I disagree with number 33: :"Join Twitter and Facebook, follow or friend a bunch of your non-vegan acquaintances, and send along great recipes, videos of cute farm animals, and timely vegan news."  That's sure to annoy your friends and get people to "un-follow" you.

Our additions to the bucket list:

Sipping soup at Moosewood Restaurant

1. Make a pilgrimmage to the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. We road-tripped to Moosewood last year, and it was great. (Not to mention, the scenary is fantastic.)

2. Go on  vacation to a vegetarian resort (or at least a vegetarian-friendly one). Nothing makes me more miserable than being on a nice vacation but having to eat crappy food (ahem, Greek all-inclusive). I don't really care where we go, but I'd prefer somewhere warm.

Now onto the VegNews list:

5. Eat a veggie dog from a street cart in Vancouver, BC.  
Does Toronto work? I think so. Except we call it "street meat".

9. Perfect a signature tofu scramble.
Done - my version is yum yum yum.

12. Splurge on a beautiful Matt & Nat bag that you can carry with pride for many years to come.
I have two, in fact. Consider them an investment.

19. Veganize your grandmother’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. Then share with everyone.  
Done! most of the cookies we make are vegan, and no one is the wiser. Eggs and milk are wasted in cookies anyway.

22. Become a vegan myth-busting machine—even if you never need to bus vegan myths.  
Who doesn`t need to bust vegan myths?

23. Attempt to work out as hard as Brendan Brazier, Kenneth Williams, Tonya Kay, Robert Cheeke, or Scott Jurek.
Done! But haven't reached the same level of competitive success, unfortunately.

26. Give fun vegan gifts such as cookbooks, baked goods, Vegan Etsy jewelry, and wine every chance you get.  
Done - for Christmas I gave my friend Rebecca some vegan body treats from Lush.

29. Try vegan ethnic food, such as Filipino, Korean, or Sri Lankan.  
Have you seen our website? Korean dak galbi is one of our favourite dishes. Not to mention Mexican, Chinese, Thai...

30. Inspire at least one person to become vegan.
I'm going to go ahead and modify here. I'd like to take credit for helping at least one person go vegetarian...but I've helped a heck of a lot more move closer to a vegetarian diet by seriously cutting down their meat eating.

31. Trek to Toronto in September for the annual Vegetarian Food Fair. ...for five years running!

38.  Don’t judge meat-eaters. They’ll just stop listening to you.  
So true. That is, if they ever listened to you in the first place.

42. Help the environment by opting for a bicycle or running shoes over a car - not sure what this one has to do with vegetarianism...but...I'll take it.

46. Start a balcony herb garden Done! Thougth we've since graduated to a deck.

49. Rekindle your childhood love of PB&J. I eat PB & J in my oatmeal several days a week.

50. Create something that helps humans feel compassion for animals: a video game, children’s book, ‘zine, novel, movie, or blog will do! uhmm...ahem.

64. Become a vegan hostess extraordinaire by throwing holiday parties, brunches, bonfires, barbecues, fondue nights, and so on.  
Yes! I don't cook meat at any of my get-togethers. Last week we had some friends over for dinner - roasted veggies with tempeh (instead of tofu), couscous, bread, cheesecake...uhm, no compalints there!

92. Attend (or, even better yet, have!) a vegan wedding. We got married last year and had a totally vegetarian wedding - butternut squash soup, roasted veggie stacks with goat cheese, curried lentils, anchovy-free Caesar salad, and apple tart.

 

The New York Times Vegetarian Blog: Why Temporary?

I've just been over at The New York Times "The Temporary Vegetarian" column, penned (or typed?) by Elaine Louie.

I scrolled through mouthwatering photos of bean dishes, eggs, potatoes, and burritos. The photos are excellent; the recipes simple and enticing. I'll be keeping my eye on this blog.

What I couldn't locate was its raison d’être: why the "temporary" vegetarian? Anyone who tries out these recipes can't possibly be intimidated by switching to a "full-time" vegetarian diet. Elaine - go for it!

The New Home of Veg Cuisine

Hello all,

To make blogging about vegetarian food easier, I've moved my blog from Suite101.com's Vegetarian Cuisine section to Blogger. 

The Blogger interface is easier to use, and hopefully, easier to find.

I tend to post once or twice per week about current events/news in the world of vegetarianism; new recipes; book reviews; and my own thoughts. I don't judge or condescend to others who don't share my food views. All are welcome here!


Please feel free to send me your comments and feedback. Please subscribe to get Veg Cuisine updates by email or via RSS feed.