Super Tasty Vegan Cream of Broccoli Soup

One of my favorite soups is Cream of Broccoli or Broccoli Cheddar, but I've never made it. Both of those are really heavy soups with lots of cream and cheese and a high fat content. However, I stumbled across a Vegan Cream of Broccoli soup recipe this morning on The Washington Post. I get recipes from all sorts of places, but never have I tried one from my local paper. I'm sure glad I gave it a try!

After this weekend's Snowzilla, our fridge was pretty empty so I was scrounging for recipes where I did not need to buy a lot of ingredients, and this Vegan Cream of Broccoli fit the bill. The soup is actually a "soup concentrate" so you're supposed to add water to it and thin it out, but I ended up adding more liquid during the blending to make it a real soup and not a soup concentrate. For those who don't want to visit the Post, here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 1 tbs of extra virgin olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 ribs of celery, chopped
• 2.5 cups of water
• 1/2 cup of rice (I used Jasmine)
• 1/2 cup raw, unsalted cashews
• 2 vegetable bouillon cubes
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 head of broccoli cut into small florets with the stems peeled and cut into small pieces. 

Instructions:
1. Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and celery and cook until tender, about 10-12 minutes.
2. Add the water, rice, cashews, bouillon, salt, broccoli stems and half the florets. Cover and reduce the heat to low. Cook 15 - 20 minutes or until rice is tender and there's not much water left in the pot.
3. Steam remaining florets in another pot.
4. Use a hand mixer or blender to blend the soup until smooth, silky and creamy. If it's too thick, add about 1/4 cup of water.
5. Fold in remaining broccoli florets.

I did, however, make minor modifications to the recipe:

• I added 3 large cloves of fresh garlic when I sautéed the veggies. 
• As I blended, I added about 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast to enhance the cheesy flavor. 
• I didn't use water. I have made a habit of saving the broth that I cook my beans in - not the water that I soak the beans, but the seasoned water that I cook my beans in - so I used that in lieu of plain water. Also I added about 1-1.5 cups of bean broth during the blending to thin it out and make it a regular soup and not a soup concentrate.

Tip about the broccoli crown. I started using a vegetable peeler to get the tough skin off, but I found that going to the cut end and peeling it with my fingers was more effective. I used the big florets in the soup and saved the smaller florets into the final product. 

This soup is so good that I don't even miss the cream or cheddar. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

So-our-dough is delicious!

After reading The Blue Zone Solution, which discussed how this little old lady in Italy made her own sourdough bread every week using the same starter her great grandmother used, I was interested in making my own sourdough bread. Sourdough bread is supposed to have a lower glycemic index, which means that it does not cause a spike in insulin in your blood stream after you eat it. Also, there are many other nutritional benefits to it because of the live cultures in the dough.

I've baked bread before with moderate success - mainly when I made hearty soups. We don't normally eat a ton of bread so I was a bit apprehensive as to how we would eat all of our homemade bread before it started going bad, but I wanted to give it a try.

My first starter turned out to be a dud. It got bubbly and sour smelling, but I ended up adding too much water and had a layer of water on top, which inhibited the yeast culture from growing. When I tried to make a loaf of bread out of that batch, I ended up with a heavy, flour brick.

Then, I tried The Kitchn's sourdough starter recipe. This one worked for me! I found that it was really important to use a scale in measuring out your water to flour ratio. I think using the measuring cups in my first attempt to sourdough starter led to my starter having too much water.

My Sourdough Starter

The key to making a good sourdough starter is a 1:1 ratio of water to all purpose flour and "feeding" or adding more water/flour regularly. I had to trouble shoot it a few times:

• I ended up having to modify the proportions here and there by minute amounts. I think because of the humidity and relative warmth of our apartment, I ended up with a thin layer of water on top after one or two feedings so I decreased the amount of water by about .1-.25 oz by weight and that worked well. 

• The starter also started to smell a little bit like beer. After some googling, I found that the odor meant my starter went too long between feedings so I made sure to stick to my feeding schedule. 

My starter is still young so I'm having to use 1.5 teaspoons of commercial yeast to make my sourdough loaves using The Kitchn's Starter Sourdough Recipe. I've read that it takes about 20 feedings to get a good strong starter. I'm getting there, because my starter is starting to grow manyfold in volume.

My hand-kneaded dough

We've been hand-kneading the bread and it took 30+ minutes with only moderate success. The loaves turned out delicious, but as you can see in the picture to the right, didn't hold their shapes well. When they rose, they expanded to the size of the bowl they were in. 

This past weekend, I grabbed my parents' Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer and used it to knead my bread. It worked so well and was so much easier. I'm so glad I'm able to use theirs and not have to buy my own. I also bought a pizza stone so we could bake round loaves. The first time I used it, I didn't spray it with oil because I thought the coating was nonstick, but we ended up having to saw off the bottom of the loaf because it was stuck on it. This week, I tried the pizza stone again and sprayed it with oil to great success.

My fears in not finishing our bread each week were a bit unnecessary. The loaves are so delicious, we have no problem eating a loaf a week. Each week I make two loaves, but I usually give away the second. Last week we finished our loaf by Thursday and had to go days without bread. 

The KitchenAid kneaded bread

This week's loaves!

Don't Kale My Vibe

During my vegan phase, I brought a kale salad to my parents' house for a family gathering. It was awful. No one ate it. I think they picked out the cucumbers, tomatoes and other salad fixings and rinsed off the dressing to eat it separately. I still haven't lived it down. Whenever we get together, I'm often mockingly asked if I'm bringing kale salad to the party. After that debacle, I started doing practice runs of all my recipes before I brought it anywhere and haven't tried making a kale salad since.

The other night I didn't feel like cooking and decided to give Whole Foods' salad bar a try. As I collected a hodgepodge of veggies into my cardboard container, I saw some "Garlicky Kale". I threw a few leaves into my box not expecting much of it. When I got home and tried everything I got, I was blown away by the kale and have been thinking about it since!

I found a mock recipe online and, to my delight, I had everything needed in my pantry.

Here's the recipe for Garlicky Kale:

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of raw kale 
• 2 tbs of tahini
• 2 tbs apple cider vinegar or water
• 2 tbs lemon or lime juice
• 1.5 tbs soy sauce
• 4 tbs nutritional yeast
• 2-3 cloves of garlic

Instructions:
1. Wash, de-stem and dry the kale. Cut into bite-sized pieces.
2. Puree all the ingredients except the kale into a food processor or blender.
3. Pour the dressing over the kale and massage with your hands until all the pieces are coated.
4. Let sit in the fridge for an hour. You could eat right away, but the kale may be a little tough and chewy.

Now, this is a kale salad recipe that will be brought to the next party!

The original recipe can be found here. I made some slight modifications:
1) Increasing the amount of garlic and not mincing them. I just threw the whole, peeled cloves of garlic in the food processor,
2) Using a lime in lieu of a lemon because that's what I had on hand,
3) Reducing the amount of soy sauce, because I found it a little too salty, and
4) Omitting the sesame seeds.



Note from 1/26/2016: You actually don't have to de-stem the kale if you chop it up into small, manageable pieces. I've since stopped de-stemming kale in almost all my recipes!

Juicing

We have this work horse of a juicer. When we first got it, we made juices every Sunday. A few months ago we decided to try out a 3-day juice cleanse. I compiled a bunch of juice recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we tried them out... well, we tried many of them out.

For the most part, the juices from our cleanse tasted pretty good, but I must admit, it was overall a pretty horrible experience. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was manageable, but things went downhill around dinner time. During dinner the first night, I got a terrible migraine - presumably from cutting so many calories in just a short amount of time. As I laid listlessly in bed with a pounding headache, Sean recommended I eat just a bite of a cookie to get my sugar levels up and so I did. Having that one bite of cookie made me feel like a new woman. My headache was gone. I was energetic and ready to make the next day's juices. But on the second night, our fatigue and hunger overwhelmed us and we gave up and went to get 5 Guys. We didn't make it to the third day...

If you're contemplating a juice cleanse, here are my major takeaways:

• You're gonna miss chewing. It's amazing how much I missed masticating. I had the distinct urge to just chomp my teeth as I sipped on my juice. It was an interesting experience.
• Doing a juice cleanse at home takes a lot of time and effort. On top of buying all of the veggies, you have to wash and cut it up because the mouth of the juicer isn't that big. Once the juice is made you have to strain it to take out the bits of of pulp. It took over an hour each night for the two of us to prepare the juices for the next day's breakfast and lunch. When we juice for fun, we normally skip the straining.
• It's nice to customize the juices in your cleanse to fit your own tastes.
• There's no comparison to the deliciousness of fresh juice.

If you decide to purchase a 3-day cleanse, many of those takeaways are moot except for the masticating. I'm sure you would still miss chewing! After the experience, we didn't really touch the juicer for a while... until this past weekend!

On a lark, we bought these funky looking berries from Whole Foods; they're sweet golden berries. Neither of us really liked the taste of them - they're tart and earthy - and so I didn't know what I was gonna do with them until I remembered our little ol' juicer. 

I made a pretty delicious juice with them yesterday using some other fruit we had on hand. Our juice contained:

• Sweet golden berries
• Plum
• Elephant heart plum
• Peach
• Watermelon
• Carrot

Even though our initial juicing experience wasn't the best, we plan on doing another one - with modifications. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was doable so we'll keep that. On our second go-round, we're going to  eat a very light vegan dinner. I'll tell you how it goes!

You're How Old?

I love reading how our eating habits are shaped by our culture. What can I say, it's the American Studies in me.

Earlier this summer I read The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People by Dan Buettner. Great beach reading right? I've been thinking about the book ever since and Buettner was the subject of a recent New York Times's piece. 

I found the book to be super interesting. Basically there are five "Blue Zones" in the world. A blue zone is defined as being home to the longest-living and healthiest people. They are:

• Okinawa, Japan
• Sardinia, Italy
• the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica
• Ikaria, Greece
• Loma Linda, California

Buettner takes his research on these blue zones and boils them down into simple habits that can be translated to an American lifestyle. He received grant money to implement pilot programs in cities and towns across the nation to see if these habits can work; and they did. Here are some basic principles from the book:

• Create communities - all of the zones have strong (often religious) communities and support networks from which residents can seek guidance and support during stressful times
• In the pilot program, residents were assigned to walking groups that met weekly to walk around the neighborhood. The walking groups were based on location and general interests. Many walking groups transformed into social networks where members brought a healthy side to share after the long walks.
• Make eating a more enjoyable experience and basically - eat less.
• In all of these communities, meals often lasted hours and were times when families would sit down together at the end of the day to catch up and eat. There was no tv, no eating alone or eating while reading, looking at the computer or anything else. 
• In blue zones, sweets and meat were saved for special occasions and eaten in moderation. It's hard to break the habit of a decadent dessert at the end of a meal, but it really does make a difference.
• Eat whole foods with an emphasis on plants.
• Eating meat in moderation can be perfectly healthy. Of the five zones, only one - the Loma Linda community in California - is strictly vegetarian. 
• The problem with the average American diet is that we eat way too much meat. Meat is a staple at every meal and our portions are large. The amount of meat many American consume in one meal is comparable to what a blue zone resident would eat in an entire week.
• Walking is the best form of exercise.
• Walking is your body's natural movement and it's far better for you than super strenuous exercise. Don't think that you need to be a marathon runner or extreme athlete to have a long, healthy life. You just need to keep your body moving in natural ways.
• Drinking isn't terrible!
• For the most part, consuming moderate amounts of alcohol - wine in particular - on a daily basis is good for you. Yay!

The book has definitely inspired me to incorporate more beans and lentils into my diet. When I was at my local MOM's, I stocked up on lentils, beans and TVP (textured veggie protein). I wasn't thinking and bought the kindle version so it's a little harder for me to flip through the pages in search for an especially tasty-looking recipe. I will do so soon and will share my results!

I highly recommend the book to those interested in healthy eating and living - get the paper & ink version though! 

A New Direction

It's been some time since I last posted, hasn't it?

Previously I devoted this blog to the various going-ons of my life. I enjoy the writing process and thinking up different topics to write about, but in the past year or so I've decided to be a little more discriminating in the information I share about my private life. Heck, they call it private life for a reason right? The blog will continue to have more personal elements but it will no longer be a hodge podge of my random musings. As I do like to share what I learn from books and personal experience, I plan to use this blog in a more focused manner.

In the past few years, I've really taken an interest in cooking and so this blog as a recipe-sharing tool for my friends. I spend a fair amount of time perusing the interwebz for good recipes, reading reviews and modifications. I hope that this blog serves as a useful tool for those who enjoy a good home-cooked meal but don't have the time to look up recipes from various websites.

I am by no means a food expert. I wouldn't even venture to call myself a connoisseur or a foodie. Consider this a collection of recipes so if you've made something amazing recently and want to share, please send them my way and I'll share it with our little community.

More reason to eat clean!

Last week I finished Michael Moss's Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. It took me a few months to read this book, not because I wasn't interested, but because it's a dense book with lots of information. I also took breaks and read other books during that time.

Ever since I went vegan for Lent almost two years ago, I've paid much more attention to the food that I eat. At the recommendation of a friend, I read Omnivore's Dilemma last year and have been interested in the food industry and eating clean ever since. Whenever I can, I try to shop at farmer's markets, local groceries, garden and make my own meals.

I found Salt Sugar Fat to be really engaging and would recommend it to those who want to learn about the processed food industry. But if reading it isn't your thing, here are some major take aways from the book:

• Food scientists hone in on a bliss point for many processed foods. A bliss point is the amount of an ingredient (salt, sugar, fat) that maximizes tastiness and keeps you craving more. For instance, having too little or too much sugar in pudding can detract from one's enjoyment and prevent or encourage eating more. Unsurprisingly, children have much higher bliss points for sugar than adults and one's bliss points changes over time and with age.
• There seems to be no bliss point for fat. Your brain doesn't process fat the way it does salt and sugar and so foods with really high fat content can be consumed without your brain or tastebuds knowing any different.
• Calories consumed through drinks also aren't registered by your brain so when you have soda, you're imbibing all of these calories yet still eating as much as you normally would.

I won't really go into the debate on processed food and the obesity epidemic beyond saying there's culpability on both the producers and consumers. If you'd like to learn more, I'd definitely recommend the book! If you have a Kindle, we can even exchange notes!