soup weather

with dropping temperatures and a head cold...it's soup weather here in Nebraska.

i suggest this broccoli soup recipe as a starting point.

(i subbed skim milk for the cream)

chili falafel burgers

thanks to one of the cookbooks gifted to me for my birthday, a falafel burger recipe that created this:

blue cheese sourdough bread, homemade spinach hummus, avocado, basil, a chili falafel burger, cucumbers and tomatoes.

eaten with a side of tater tots :-)

the burgers are relatively simple, you just need chickpeas, onions, spices and a bit of lemon juice. Then coat in flour and fry in olive oil. Next time I need to be careful not to blend the ingredients too much in my food processor- these didn't stick together too well. Thankfully the lack of cohesion did little to alter the taste.

summer cooking in omaha

a deluge of recipes and eats since I've been terrible about posting this summer, a bonus being that all but one of these are vegetarian.

chickpeas and dumplings: this recipe comes from one of my favorite bloggers, Mama Pea. It's delicious and I've made it twice now, eating it all week long as leftovers.

vegetable broth with carrots, celery, onions and chickpeas

biscuits dropped on top

let simmer while covered and then eat up the goodness

falafels and pita bread: pita bread is an old favorite from our Mongolia cooking days, but I've been dying to try making falafels for forever. this was pre-food processor so I hand-mashed them with a large plastic spoon.

mid-mashing

fried, delicious goodness, these were a huge office favorite. We ate them on the pitas with cucumbers, tomatoes and plain yogurt and hummus.

green onion soup: this came about when my tendency to over-buy green onions at the farmers' market forced me to come up with a recipe that would use them up. I found a basic recipe that I no longer can locate but then proceeded to basically completely change it, rendering it pretty much useless anyway.

aren't these carrots gorgeous?

toss in lots of veggies, green onions, milk and heavy whipping cream. Yum.

carrot fries and hummus sauce: these are both thanks to Jessi at Naptime Diaries. The sauce has become a go-to of mine for salad dressing and is SO easy to make. Literally you just need hummus, balsamic and honey.

spinach hummus: crossed a goal of my year 24 list when I made hummus for the first time in my life. And Holy Mother of Hummus, this stuff is addictive. I fear I've eaten most of the tub in the span of 12 hours.

quinoa bake: this recipe is compliments of Healthy Tipping Point and is a perfect light version of a casserole that is both healthy and filling.

eggplant lasagna: This is a Mama Pea hybrid. I took her original recipe and subbed eggplant, but the filling is to die for, so it really doesn't matter what you use. Any lasagna that requires cream cheese is a win for me (also means that I made it not vegan).

Lesson of the summer? Eat your veggies. There are too many good recipes that will go to waste otherwise.

anyway you like it

pizza is a canvas not just meant for tomato sauce. which is why this one has mashed up avocado mixed up with leftover hummus.
onions, black beans, radishes...

cucumbers, pepperoni, bok choy, cheese...
delicious.

when carrots are plentiful

I have Hol to blame for this most recent creation, as she introduced me to the joy of carrot cake cookies.

And then when I had an abundance of carrots, I couldn't help but want to make them.

And because one of the things that was top on my list of "things I wanted to eat when in America" was pumpkin, I happened to have a can of it sitting in my cupboard, calling my name.

And thus these carrot cake cookies became pumpkin carrot cake cookies.

Perfect with milk, tea or crumbled up in yogurt for breakfast.

I call this the grater from the dark place because it's always trying to cut off my fingers.

Eat up my friends. And when you can't eat anymore (or shouldn't) because you live alone and should never consume an entire batch of cookies, take them to your local thrift store (where you also happen to work). People will like them so much they will describe them with expletives. Points!

bi bim bap

bi bim bap [bee-bim-bop]

during the summer of 2010, i became very familiar with korean food. it became one of those things i hated to love and loved to hate. it was very frequent in my life, a daily basis--some weeks a 3 meals a day basis.

i heard recently that we crave what we eat.

that summer and then after, i started craving korean food. the spices and sauces and even the kimchi became familiar to me in a way that i craved it, liked it and was excited to find good korean restaurants when i returned to the USA.

i haven't found a great korean food place yet...living in DC, you would think that would be easy but i'll be honest, i haven't looked all over just yet.

so, a few weeks ago, i decided i would make some. i taught cooking classes while in mongolia and boast about my [limited] cooking skills.

so, i went to whole foods [which erin told me stories about that i half-way believed until i went to one--so cool!] and i gathered up the materials to make this rice-stirfry-spicy korean dish.

you can find the recipe i based the meal off of, here. essentially, you need these things:

vegetables, meat, egg, oil, rice and spicy paste

the vegetables each have different ways of cooking. i used carrots, spinach, sprouts, zucchini and mushrooms and for the meat tofu.

after you cook the vegetables, you can arrange them on a plate.

then you can fry and egg [sorry, don't have a picture of this--use your imagination]

then place the rice in the bottom of the bowl and arrange your veggies and meat on top, and add the fried egg that i keep almost forgetting about.

add your spicy paste [korean chili paste works fine]

mix and toss like a salad and enjoy!

some recent eats and a recipe

I am living in vegetable heaven over here in Nebraska. the farmer's markets are open, the weather is warm, the gardens are growing and I am enjoying a plethora of veggies in my kitchen.

living in Mongolia convinced me that recipes are a starting point and not an absolute. So these last few weeks I've been taking basic recipes and making do with what I have.

For example....

pumpkin soup! I can't remember where I got the recipe from, but it included lots of onions and milk and pumpkin. I used too much nutmeg trying to compensate for a lack of other spices, so it had a bit of a kick, but I liked it just the same.

Or my bok choy black bean veggie pizza that ended up being not nearly as weird as it sounds. I promise! It's just an even better version of vegetable pizza. Especially if you use this pizza crust recipe.

And last but not least, I once again attempted to make one of the Daily Garnish recipes. Except my version of her mexican quinoa dish had a few add-ons and substitutions.

Mine had tomatoes, green onions, green olives, green pepper, cucumber, black beans, an onion, an avocado and instead of lime juice, lemon juice.

Plus I discovered that you can sub plain yogurt for sour cream and it tastes just as good.

Here's to a summer of even more vegetable-filled recipes and experiments!

sort of vegan brownies

these were my official first attempt at a vegan dessert. I was mainly excited by the idea of banana brownies and not by the fact that they would be vegan.

So I diligently saved two of my bananas from normal daily consumption and waited until they were nice and brown. And then I looked up the Chocolate Chip Banana Brownie recipe from the Daily Garnish blog (which I love) and got to work.

Near the end, I started thinking about the three Reese Peanut Butter Cup easter eggs that had recently arrived in a letter from my mom and were hanging out in my freezer. What better way to personalize a recipe than by adding peanut butter cups?

So I chopped them up, tossed them in and effectively ended the brownies future as a vegan dessert. Can't be vegan when you add in peanut butter cups :-)

I also just used all regular flour instead of using half pastry flour, and while they were still reallllyyyyyy good, I could certainly tell in the consistency that they would have been lighter had I used the pastry flour.

Also, a bonus of not using eggs in a brownie recipe is that you can stick the batter that didn't fit in the pan in the fridge and eat it like a DELICIOUS pudding for several days after.

Not that I did that or anything. Not at all.

black bean veggie burgers

I'm not a vegetarian but I do have vegetarian leanings.

and while I was in Mongolia, eating beef and mutton was a daily reality that could not be avoided if I wanted to be culturally appropriate and sensitive.

so I ate my meat and day-dreamed about having the choice to avoid meat all together.

my list of recipes to make upon returning to the US cover a lot of this vegetarian ground...including one of my favorite vegetarian items, black bean burgers.

I used this recipe, but then also made a lot of changes, so we'll just say that was the starting point.

mainly, I didn't have any onion or garlic so I instead decided to add the vegetables that I did happen to have- which included shredded carrot, diced cucumber and a little bit of parsley for good measure. I also didn't have any hot sauce, so I skipped that all together.

The biggest challenge to making veggie burgers at home is that almost every recipe I have ever found suggests/requires a food processor. I would LOVE to have a food processor. It's on my list of gadgets to invest in. But I don't have one right now. So I mashed with a fork and diced with a knife, trying to get things as small as possible. I also just realized upfront that my veggies burgers were going to be more on the chunky side, which was fine by me.

verdict? definitely good. definitely easy to make. definitely could have used some more seasoning.

next time I think I'll focus on getting the seasoning down right.

served on pita with spinach hummus, some broccoli slaw and salsa on top:

coming baaaack

well hello people who have probably stopped reading this basically defunct blog.

life got in the way of creative cooking. life got in the way of documenting the creative cooking that did happen. and then by the end, we were just mainly eating some variation of Mongolian food every. single. night.

and well let's be honest, that's just not all that exciting.

unless of course you like looking at various versions of veggies/meat mixed with some carbohydrate.

but I'm in Omaha now. And Hol is in D.C.

And I'll be darned if creativity can't come back to the kitchens in our respective new cities. And we'll sure as heck still be wearing long underwear in the winters since D.C. isn't exactly Hawaii. And Nebraska likes itself a cold, windy winter from what I've heard.

So to bring us back to the now...

I present my very first food post in a very, very long time.

Quinoa Tabbouleh.

Also known as one of those recipes that I drooled over while in Mongolia and dreamt about the day that I could actually attempt. I have quite a lot of those actually. And my googling/bookmarking/salivating self always got made fun of by my more practical roommate who never got why I tortured myself looking at recipes that weren't possible in our current state.

But guess what? I like to dream :-) In multi-colored vegetable, interesting grain dreams!

And this stuff is A.) easy, B.) tasty and C.) healthy.

Defintely making this again and again and again.