Dinner - September 7, 2009

This would not be a typical summer meal but I had some older green beans to use up. I stated with Bishop's Braised Green Beans with Tomatoes, Olives, Capers and Basil recipe from Vegetables Every Day. From there I used a 28 oz can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes, 20 olives, 1 tbsp capers, 6 cloves garlic, added 1 lb of eggplant, and added 1 can of white navy beans. I also had to substitute parsley for the basil.

For the 1 lb of green beans I used 12 oz of green beans and 4 oz of yellow wax beans. The eggplant were 4 small white globes with a purple blush. I only peeled the eggplant where there were blemishes and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces.

I cooked this up in my dutch oven.

Yum. I really liked this and plan to make it a regular for us. Matt said it is comfort food. Prep is easy.

Dinner - August 26, 2009

When the camera battery is low the auto-focus does not appear to work.

The first picture is a Tomato Curry. The recipe is from a cookbook that I already returned to the library. It was tasty but not what I expected. I had cooked up some yellow split peas over which I was going to serve the curry. I ended up just mixing them into the curry and calling it soup. It was a nice taste with the fresh heirloom cherry tomatoes of strange colors but anything is good with that much coconut milk.


The second recipe was the topping from Jack Bishop's recipe "Crisp Tortillas with Pattypan Squash, Eggplant, and Tomato." The recipe can be found in A year in the Vegetarian Kitchen. I did not use the tortillas or the queso fresco. I believe I doubled the rest of the recipe. This was again not what I was expecting but pretty good. The lime and chipotle chile gave the dish some variety from a regular ratatouille.

I enjoyed both dishes but I would say they have a little work to become regulars. I am giving these a taste rating of "have potential" and I really mean they have a lot of potential. Cooking up lentils, soup, and veggies separately was a lot of work so as a whole I would say this was a weekend meal but the individual dishes all have weeknight potential.

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 1, 2009

Way behind. Need to post these old dishes.

Curry with local veggies. I need to find this recipe so I can make it again today.

Found it. You can find the recipe for Five-Vegetable Curry from Eating Well at http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/five_vegetable_curry.html

Hot Weather Ratatouille

It was too hot to turn the oven on and it was getting late. I opted for this easy one dish stove top recipe. It is called Tempeh Ratatouille and is in Berley's book Fresh Food Fast. He calls for oil and serving it on cracked wheat but we skipped both. I also only used half the tempeh.

I was not expecting much and found I loved it. Matt was remembering a recent Ratatouille we made from Berley's Flexitarian Table and could only say this one had potential. I really don't know what to expect from the dish so the ease and flavor won me over.

We do think more effort should be made to cook the tempeh longer but this was probably due to the lack of oil. Also this barely fit in my dutch oven so I don't know what kind of large skillet he has. I used the juice of lemon as the recipe called for but I probably should have reduced this since we didn't have the oil.

We enjoyed a very nice bottle of champagne. I was surprised to find the wine was great with the raw bits of vegetable I stole while chopping, in particular the tomatoes. It didn't do too well with the lemon juice and hot pepper in the final dish but there was not much wine left by that time anyway.

When Matt wasn't looking I used a piece of whole wheat bread to sop up the great liquid left on my plate. The picture is from half way through the meal.

We ate about half of this for dinner and took the other half for lunch the next day. I thought it made a great lunch.