Lunch - February 4, 2010

This morning I made chili and cornbread for our lunches. The night before we had some prepared soup and bread along side a big green salad for dinner. All of those ingredients were delivered by our new grocery service, Farm Fresh Delivery. It was great to have an easy, healthy, and tasty meal. Next time I will have to order enough for leftovers.

I am working on developing my own chili recipe. Below is a quick rundown on the ingredients.

Kristen's Chili - Try 1
1 onion chopped
2 shallots chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 jalapeño chopped
3 mini peppers chopped
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp oregano
1 tbsp cumin
8 oz seitan ground in food processor
2 tbsp tomato paste
12 oz chopped fire roasted tomatoes
1 14 oz can black beans rinsed
1 14 oz can chickpeas rinsed
1 cup vegetable broth
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 tbsp lime juice
1/3 cup cilantro
Salt

Vegetable broth
Onion trimmings
Shallot trimmings
Carrot tops
Celery
Olive oil
Water

I made the broth as I was making the chili.

We both thought the chili was quite good. I had planned on developing a chili with pinto beans but I was pretty happy with the texture of the chickpeas today. I am not sure which way to go next.

Lunch - January 30, 2010

I created a make do lunch. I am going to call it Quick Tomato Pantry Soup.

1 large shallot finely chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
1 28oz can chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup chickpeas, rinsed
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
salt
pepper
2 tbsp basil chopped

Saute the shallots in the olive oil in a chef's pot. Add the tomatoes and bring to a low boil. Mash tomatoes with a tomato masher. Add the chick peas and corn and heat through. Add the balsamic and salt and pepper. Stir in the basil and serve.

I am going to say this was 3 servings and tasted pretty good.

Dinner - August 12, 2009

We had a first course of fresh tomatoes and basil with chickpeas in a room temperature salad. After enjoying the salad I started cooking dinner.

Later for the second course we had a version of Eating Well's Five-Vegetable Curry. You can find my original post here. This time I had no sweet potato so I used carrots as a substitute. Still a great dish and a good way to eat eggplant.

I am still giving this a taste rating of a 4 but it is good enough to serve to meat eaters. The dish is just more of an everyday dish. Maybe next time I will think of a way to fancy it up a bit.

Dinner - July 17, 2009

Looks like we have a dish of zucchini and chickpeas cooked up with some leftover rice from Indian carryout. This dish is paired with a dish of green beans, yellow wax beans, and mushrooms.

I believe we found this quite satisfying. I don't have a recipe for the squash. The beans and mushrooms are based on the recipe "Green & Yellow Beans with Wild Mushrooms" from the Eating Well website. I use a much higher mushroom to bean ratio. I often do a pound of mushrooms, pre-trimmed weight, for a pound of beans.

This is Matt's favorite green bean dish. When the mushrooms and beans are really good, you can't beat it.

Dinner - July 14, 2009

Made a version of Berley's "Spicy Summer Bean and Chickpea Salad with Harissa Vinaigrette" from Fresh Food Fast. I had lots of squash and no green or wax beans so I substituted some sauteed zucchini and yellow squash.

I did a lower fat version of doubling the recipe. I doubled the chickpeas, garlic, cumin, and caraway. I did not double the oil or the cayenne pepper. I increased the lemon juice by about 50%.

We enjoyed this dish. If you are trying to use up some squash, give it a try. If you want a really good dish make the original recipe with the beans. You can find a previous post for the real recipe here.

I served this salad along side a simply dressed leafy green salad and some crusty bread. This felt like a light meal but was quite filling.

Lunch - June 30, 2009

This was a little salad I made up for Matt's lunch. He likes bean salads to toss with a box of lettuce at work. Our local source for prepackaged bean salads has dried up.

Chickpea Salad Topper
1 cup of chickpeas drained (with 3 tbsp of liquid reserved)
2 green onions (white part chopped, green part sliced)
1 Hungarian pepper (chopped)
1 tomato (chopped)
1 yellow squash (chopped)
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp red wine vinegar
3 tbsp of reserved liquid from chickpeas

I used chickpeas that I had cooked up following the basic recipe in Bishop's Italian Vegetarian cookbook.

Matt really liked this. He said it was the fresh tomato that made it so good.

I finally wanted some Okra and I couldn't find it

I made the Three Sisters Stew with Okra and Leeks from Berley's Fresh Food Fast without the okra (page 105). I have never gone looking for okra so I didn't know it was hard to find. Berley notes in the intro to the recipe that you should make the recipe even if you can't find okra and I agree.


While this was cooking I made up some Spicy Summer Bean and Chickpea Salad with Harissa Vinaigrette from the same cookbook (page 125). I was planning for this to be for lunch the next day but it was so good we decided to have some with dinner. We were glad to have it also to have some variety of texture to the meal.

On the stew I left out the butter and the olive oil in the cooking and the sour cream in the garnish. This means we ate a soup of nothing but vegetables, water, and salt. It was excellent. I am going to guess it is the leeks that create the decent broth but the ripeness of the vegetables that carry it the rest of the way. If you can get the vegetables, I suggest making it tonight. In a month you may have missed your opportunity. The chopping on this is not to bad since most of the items remain large. I chopped as I cooked to save time.

On the beans I used 2 Tbsp of lemon juice instead of the 3 since I left out the olive oil. I also only used 1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper. Maybe I will try a little more next time. We found that the chickpeas could use a little salt. Trimming the beans is the biggest time on this recipe.