vegan vegetable quinoa chickpea soup

Sometimes you just need soup. And now that winter has finally hit with a good three or four inches of snow that I am forced to shovel, I am thrilled to come back inside the warm house to be greeted by this hearty, filling, vegan soup. Best part – like most soups, you can experiment and throw in whatever you like, whatever you have on hand.

Vegan vegetable quinoa chickpea soup

Ingredients (you can play with this as much as you like… this is just what I’ve done)
1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion or two shallots, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
6 cloves crushed garlic
1 cup dry quinoa (I use tricolor quinoa)
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
2 teaspoon dry basil
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
2 or 3 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 container (about 15 ounces) chickpeas, rinsed and drained
28 ounces (about two normal-sized tins) of crushed tomatoes
6 cups vegetable broth
1 tin coconut milk
Any vegetables you want to throw in
Salt, pepper to taste

In a soup pot, saute the onions/shallots, and if you are using the carrot and celery saute those too. I have not always added these, and the soup is good without them. Add a pinch of salt and continue to saute until soft. Just before adding other ingredients, throw in the garlic and saute for half a minute.

Add the fennel seeds, basil, Italian seasoning, nutritional yeast, and stir. Add the rinsed quinoa and chickpeas. Stir and saute for one minute or so. Add the tomatoes, vegetable broth and coconut milk. Stir. Bring to a boil on medium-high heat. Once boiling, reduce heat to simmer and cook with the lid on for about 20 minutes.

Stir now and again to make sure the quinoa does not stick to the bottom of the pan. After about 15 minutes, throw in whatever frozen vegetables you want to add (I threw in some broccoli). Then at about 20 minutes, throw in the fresh veg that don’t need as long to cook; I added some quartered zucchini and a few cups of baby spinach leaves. Once you add the vegetables let it cook for another five or ten minutes until the veg achieves a consistency you like.

amazing vegan mashed cauliflower

Finally, after much experimentation, I have achieved the perfect consistency and flavor for my mashed cauliflower. Side benefit: it’s vegan (although you could add a bit of butter if you wanted when you’re blending it). I wanted it to be flavorful and have the same consistency as fluffy mashed potatoes.

In the past when I’ve tried to make this, I used fresh cauliflower, which somehow didn’t soften up well enough, and I got something less than cohesive and almost grainy. The frozen cauliflower, added directly from the freezer releases liquid as it roasts, helping to soften it while still allowing the cauliflower to take on a nutty, roasted flavor. It’s also a lifesaver because this can be done on the fly if you have cauliflower in your freezer, as I always do.

I also added an onion to the pan because previous attempts to make mashed cauliflower didn’t end up having much flavor. Once roasted, of course, you don’t want the cauliflower to have too much liquid in it because it will be too watery/soupy when blended. Somehow I got the right ratio of everything this time, and the texture was just like the mashed potatoes I wanted to emulate.

The downside is… I couldn’t get a good photo (as if I ever do). I mean how can mushy, mashed-up, grey cauliflower ever look good? And when, frankly, I am a terrible photographer and the lighting in my house is bad (especially at 4 a.m. when I made this)? Try not to let the dull look of this dish as I prepared and photographed it put you off. I assure you, as much as this looks like slop (as many of my best-tasting meals do), this is amazing.

Ingredients
1 package (600 grams) frozen cauliflower florets
one small or medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt to taste
pepper to taste
pinch of cayenne pepper to taste, if desired

In a medium-sized roasting pan (or a medium cast iron skillet, which is what I did), add the oil, chopped onion and cauliflower. Roast in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes, add a pinch of salt, stir, and return to the oven for maybe another 20 minutes at 180C. It’s ready when the cauliflower is completely roasted and soft/mashable.

Mash up the bigger pieces of cauliflower and add salt, pepper and cayenne before transferring to a bowl. Use a hand/stick blender to mix blend to a mashed potato consistency.

Taste to make sure you like the seasoning (and season to your taste).

experimental vegan cream of broccoli soup

Experimenting over the last few months with using what I have rather than racing to the store to buy something random. I have been messing about with some variation of this recipe for cream of broccoli soup… I don’t have exact measurements, but will indicate in the description some approximations.

Vegan cream of broccoli soup

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
diced or crushed garlic, to taste
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon mustard (Dijon or plain yellow mustard)
4 cups vegetable broth/bouillon
sprinkle of turmeric
1 teaspoon mustard powder
6 cups of broccoli (I often use frozen bags of broccoli for this recipe)
nutritional yeast to taste
lemon juice
coconut milk, salt, pepper to taste (after blending)

Saute onion for about five minutes in the olive oil in a pot large enough to make a soup.

Add garlic, pepper, and mustard. Stir and cook for about half a minute before adding the broth.

You can use vegetable stock, vegetable broth or just make some vegetable bouillon. I always add a sprinkle of turmeric at this stage and a teaspoon of mustard powder.

Once you’ve added the broth to the onion/garlic in the pot, bring to a simmer and then add your broccoli.

Let the mixture come to a good simmer and cook for about 10 or 15 minutes. The longer it goes, the more the flavor develops. But you don’t have to spend long on this if you’re hungry and just want to eat.

Once you’re satisfied and the broccoli is soft enough to blend, remove the pot from heat and add the lemon juice (to taste, but this could be anything from about 1 teaspoon to a tablespoon) and nutritional yeast if you like the stuff (not necessary but does add a cheesy/umami flavor); I have at times added up to a cup, other times I’ve added maybe a quarter cup. It really depends on your taste preferences.

Once this is stirred, blend the soup in the pot with a stick blender (preferably; you could of course do this in a blender but that’s always messy).

After blended, you can eat it, add some garnishes and eat it or add salt, pepper to taste and possibly even coconut milk if you would like it thinner, creamier or milder in flavor. In the photo below, there is coconut milk in it – and there was some parmesan cheese sprinkled on top making it not-quite vegan.

Ugly lockdown baking: Aquafaba vegan chocolate mousse – version 1

Aquafaba is strange and miraculous.

Aquafaba vegan chocolate mousse – version 1

Aquafaba, the equivalent of four egg whites
1 cup sugar
Several tablespoons of sifted unsweetened cocoa

(You could also add vanilla extract and/or vanilla bean powder when you’re adding the cocoa. You can also add a lot more cocoa if you prefer. I used about two tablespoons, so it has a light chocolate touch.

Heat sugar and aquafaba, whisking together, in a glass bowl over a saucepan filled with water, gently simmering.

When the sugar is completely dissolved, transfer the mixture to a mixing bowl of a stand mixer. Use the whisk attachment to whisk at high speed until it comes together in medium peaks.

Can you believe that this is chickpea water?!

Sift cocoa in and this point and continue to whisk – this will take while but will become fluffy eventually.

Put in individual serving bowls and refrigerate for a few hours.

It’s not ‘pretty’, and this won’t be quite like the mousse you might be used to. It is very light but has a chocolatey marshmallow flavor.

This is a very simple version of a kind of vegan “mousse” you could make if you want something chocolate, light, easy, and vegan. I will soon try another version.

Ugly lockdown cooking: Vegan lentil slop

In emptying the cupboards all the remains are lentils, dried legumes and tinned tomato. For a while a few containers of coconut milk lingered.

In the last few days I’ve made ugly variations on this recipe (if you could really call it that) using different sorts of lentils I had on hand.

Variations on lentil slop

1 small onion, diced
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger
1/2 bunch of cilantro (I have not had any of this, but used coriander powder)
1 tablespoon curry
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
1 (or 1.5c) cup lentils
1 can coconut milk (15 ounce/standard size) or 1 can crushed tomatoes
2 cups vegetable broth or water
pinch of salt

Saute onion for about 3 minutes, add garlic, ginger, cilantro and saute another minute. Stir in the other spices – be creative and choose what to add and in what your proportion to your own taste.

Rinse your lentils and add to the pan along with the coconut milk. If you’re using tomato instead of coconut milk (or in addition), you might want to add the tomatoes to the spice mixture to simmer for a bit before adding the lentils. Stir everything together once it’s in the pan. Bring mixture to boil over high heat, reduce to medium-low and simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring every so often until the lentils are soft.

The worst one of all – beluga lentils (made with coconut milk) topped with Oatly oat-based sour cream.

Red lentils (made with coconut milk) with brown basmati rice

Yellow lentils (made with tomato and water – not vegetable broth).

Ugly lockdown baking: Flapjacks

The cupboards are almost bare, and I’ve intentionally been whittling down their contents to this barren state. I am cautioned that this is the behavior of someone expecting an apocalypse. I’m not. But I am clearing out the stuff that’s been occupying space for much too long, and which no longer has much function. When I used to bake industrial amounts of cakes and cookies, I had a lot of use for bulk stores of sugar and baking soda. Not so now.

Although oats are something I will continue to use, replenishing them frequently isn’t a terrible idea. Thinking of oats, and flapjacks, I can’t help but think of the iconic packaging for Scott’s Porage Oats.

I wrote in another recent baking post about watching a show that featured a visit to the astounding Tate & Lyle sugar refinery (it’s rather scary to think about the amount of sugar consumed in the world)… as stated, I’m working my way through ingredients that have been in my cupboards for a long time but need to be used, including several containers of Lyle’s Golden Syrup. There are pretty much no better uses for golden syrup (and oats!) than ANZAC biscuits or the very basic flapjack.

Very simple flapjacks

295 grams unsalted butter
250 grams golden syrup
500 grams rolled porridge oats
pinch of salt

Prepare an 8×8 pan – butter the pan and line with parchment for easy lifting out of the pan. Preheat oven to 180C (160C if you have a fan) or 350F.

Combine butter and syrup in a saucepan; stir together until melted. Add oats and salt. Mix well. Press mixture evenly into pan. Bake about 25 minutes (until top is golden). Leave in the pan for 30 minutes, lift out and let cool completely on a wire rack.

Cut into squares once cooled. Like many such… rustic goods… they aren’t pretty, but that says nothing about what they taste like.

Ugly lockdown baking: Aquafaba vegan divinity candy

On this day of torrential downpours, excessive reading and television viewing, I am not sure that there is a better time to experiment with food.

As I previously wrote, I don’t like cooking. Baking and candy-making is a bit more up my alley. Sometimes, various ingredients I use in cooking, like a tin of chickpeas, have castoff bits. Normally you strain your beans, sending the valuable bean water down the sink. But in fact, this miraculous liquid (also known as aquafaba) can act as an egg-white substitute and used to make vegan meringue, vegan Swiss meringue buttercream, and any number of other things… like espresso meringue cookies (my first aquafaba experiment).

the miracle juice…

… looks like mucus

I had some chickpea water leftover from one of my ugly cooking extravaganzas, and I thought about what kind of sweet things I could attempt. I thought back to a baking/candy-making disaster of my childhood. My mother tried to make traditional divinity candy many years ago, and it requires (as all divinity does) such extensive beating that she burned out her ancient hand mixer. She’s never made it again, despite replacing the hand mixer with a more heavy-duty stand mixer.

I should also note here that corn syrup is called for in this kind of recipe, and apart from believing that corn syrup is flavorless and bad, it’s also just not sold here. I use golden syrup instead.

I recently watched the lightweight but engaging Nadiya’s Time to Eat on Netflix, in which the affable host, Nadiya, visited the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery and made a recipe using Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which is something I use liberally and always have on hand for my baking.

I had never given much thought to the syrup but had a gab with S about it, and he said he always thought, as a kid, that there was a dead lion on the label. We looked it up, and indeed, it is a dead lion with bees buzzing around it, bearing text related to a Biblical passage (Judges 14:14): “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”. A rotting lion carcass seems like an unusual slogan and brand position for a sickly sweet baking ingredient, but it has remained the same since the beginning. I read up a bit on Abram Lyle only to discover that he was a teetotaler and devout Presbyterian Scot, and is quoted as having said he’d “rather see a son of his carried home dead than drunk”.

Not terribly strange, but when you consider that his company merged with the rival Tate enterprise (to form Tate & Lyle), it’s strange bedfellows. Henry Tate, best known perhaps for giving his name and art collection to numerous art galleries in the UK, also gave freely to “non-establishment” causes and workers’ conditions. What struck me, in contrast to Lyle, was that he established a bar to let his workers have a good time (and probably to keep them out of trouble, trouble being bad for productivity, of course). Though Lyle and Tate the men never met each other, it’s hard to think Lyle would have approved of this kind of recreation. I love the contrast and kind of wish the men had met, and we could have a semi-fictional miniseries on the competing sugar refiners, along the same lines of The English Game to tell what could probably be a fascinating story. Much more fascinating than the tale of how my experimental aquafaba divinity candy turned out.

Aquafaba vegan divinity candy

2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1/4 cup golden syrup (or corn syrup, which isn’t sold here, and is not as nice or flavorful as golden syrup anyway)
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons aquafaba/chickpea water
1 teaspoon vanilla
(Add chopped nuts, if desired)

Heat sugar, water, syrup and salt in a heavy-bottomed pot, stirring constantly until sugar is dissolved. Add a candy thermometer, and continue cooking until the mixture reaches hard ball stage on the thermometer.

Separately, beat the aquafaba with a mixer using the whisk attachment until it holds a stiff, meringue-like shape.

Very slowly add the sugar mixture and vanilla into the beaten aquafaba, and beat until stiff peaks form. You must beat to get the stiffest possible peaks; divinity will not hold its shape if you don’t beat it to the right consistency. That means you are going to beat, beat and beat some more… and you will be very happy that you have a stand mixer that can work autonomously.

To give you an idea of how much time the beating will take, know that I read a whole book. Between waiting for the syrup mixture to reach hard ball stage and the interminable beating stage, I read Virginia Woolf‘s A Room of One’s Own in its entirety. I’m a fast reader, and it’s not an excessively long book. But you get the idea. This is a very easy recipe – but it’s extremely time consuming. You will, however, be able to do multitask while the mixer works its magic. I think the “hard ball” waiting period was about 30 minutes, and then the beating process to reach the final product was another 30 minutes. Obviously this can differ, but this is just what worked for me.

At the very end of the process, add nuts if so inclined. Oh, I also added a wee pinch of red food coloring just to get a subtle tint for the final product.

Make small, rough blobs of divinity on pans lined with parchment or wax paper, or put into a pan and cut into squares. Let the little overly sweet balls set. I don’t eat stuff like this but did take a wee taste to make sure these at least taste edible. Apart from being sickeningly sweet (which some people like), they have a more complex flavor than if I’d made them with corn syrup, and also have a deeply vanilla flavor (thanks to the vanilla extract and vanilla bean powder I added).

Ugly lockdown cooking: Chickpea quinoa concoction

I don’t like cooking, and I don’t enjoy shopping for food. Preparing anything beyond just throwing asparagus or broccoli into a roasting pan or whipping spinach and kiwi together in a blender with frozen berries is taxing and not how I prefer to spend my time. But now that we’re facing the dregs of my cupboards, I’m just making whatever is… possible. Something vegan… and ugly as usual.

Chickpea quinoa concoction

1 cup quinoa (I used a tricolor mix; rinsed)
1.5 cups water
1 tin crushed tomatoes (you could use stewed tomatoes with chilies, peppers, garlic or just plain tomatoes)
1 tin chickpeas, drained (you can of course also use fresh chickpeas)
1-2 tablespoons of olive oil or coconut oil (butter if you don’t care if this is vegan)
1-2 garlic cloves, minced
1 small onion, minced
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon cumin
pinch of black pepper
pinch of turmeric
pinch of salt

Heat oil in a large pan and add onion; saute for about five minutes, add the garlic and saute for another minute or two. Add the spices (cayenne, cumin, pepper, turmeric).

Increase heat on stove to medium-high. Add the rinsed quinoa, water, tomato. Stir. Add in the chickpeas. Stir again. Bring to a boil.

Stir, reduce temperature to low to maintain a low simmer. Cover the pan, let cook for 15 or so minutes. Turn off the heat and let sit for a minute or two.

Serve on its own, with a flatbread, with a dollop of sour cream (or non-dairy sour cream) or whatever strikes your fancy.

Lockdown vanilla pudding pie

I blame the lockdown for all the ingredients I have on hand that I only use half of before I need to use them up or lose them forever. This leads me to bake random things that I have to pawn off on unsuspecting people. I suspect this is one of those experiments that won’t be welcomed with open arms, minds or mouths.

Vanilla pudding made with coconut milk

2/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 1/2 cups coconut milk (unsweetened) – feel free to use other kinds of milk to your taste
4 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract, maybe a dash of vanilla bean powder

How to

Whisk the sugar and salt together in a small saucepan.

Separate four eggs; set the whites aside for use in something else.

Combine the cornstarch and 2 tablespoons of coconut milk to dissolve the cornstarch.

Add the cornstarch mix, the rest of the coconut milk and four egg yolks to the saucepan and whisk well.

Cook the mixture on medium heat, stir constantly.

Once mix thickens (and it will – it seems to take a while but once it starts, it gets thick quickly), lower the heat and cook for one minute while constantly whisking.

Pour the mix through a fine sieve, stir in the vanilla. Pour into a bowl, if eating as pudding. Pour into a pre-baked pie crust if making a pudding pie.

Affix plastic wrap directly to the surface of the pudding/pie filling and chill 2+ hours.

Pictured: The bit of the pudding that didn’t fit in the pie.

Lockdown baking

I don’t bake much any more. And during a lockdown I can’t even give the baked goods to very many people. But I also have a bunch of ingredients that need to be used… so here’s the vanilla pound cake I made the other day.

Vanilla pound cake

1 3/4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup softened butter
3/4 cups granulated sugar
2/3 cup milk (you can use milk substitutes; I used coconut milk)
2 eggs (lightly beaten)
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract (I also threw in a dash of vanilla bean powder)

How to

Heat oven to 170c/325F. Grease and flour your loaf pan.

Sift the flour and add the baking powder.

Cream the butter and sugar for several minutes.

Slowly add the beaten eggs on low speed. Add the vanilla extract once mixed.

Add half the milk, mix. Then mix in half of the flour, keeping the mixer on a slow speed. Add the remaining milk and fold in the rest of the flour until combined.

Put mixture in prepared loaf tin. Bake for about 1 hour. Use a toothpick in the middle to check its doneness; when it comes out clean, it’s ready to take out. Cool in the pan for ten minutes; remove from pan and let cool.

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vegan vegetable quinoa chickpea soup