Creamy Vegetable Soup [vegan]

Friday is soup night at our house! This is one of our current favourites, a versatile soup packed full of veggies with a creamy tomato base. I like it because I always have these ingredients on hand, and if I'm bereft of fresh green veggies I can use frozen instead! This recipe makes about eight large servings.

Saute two large onions in a tin or two (2-4 cups homemade) of coconut milk, with a blend of dried or fresh herbs (thyme/oregano/basil/sage), garlic, and a sprinkle of cayenne pepper. 

 

Add diced carrots and sweet potatoes, and green veg. Today it was kale but spinach works too, as does frozen green veggies like spinach/kale/peas. 

Stir in three tins of chickpeas, and 800g (large tin) crushed tomatoes or puree. Add in enough water (or broth, if that's what you prefer) to cover all the ingredients and allow to simmer for a while. When the carrots are softened, throw in a box/ bag of pasta. If you're using a gluten free pasta, you'll want to wait to add this to the heated soup and cook it right before you plan to eat. Otherwise, add the pasta and then simmer for another minute or two.

Put the lid on the pot and turn off the heat; allow the soup to cool on the back of the stove until you're ready to re-heat for dinner. This is a great make-ahead soup; it tastes best the day after! It's also a perfect last-minute soup; start to finish it takes about fifteen minutes to prep and half an hour to cook. 

Other variations: omit the pasta and add 4-5 large potatoes, or omit the pasta and add 2 cupfuls brown short grain rice. For both of these, include when you add the veggies rather than at the end!

 

What's on the table?

Our meals have been light over the last few weeks.  We've eaten summer food... salads of every kind, toast and scrambled eggs, chilled melon and blueberries, and on Monday, plum and apple crumble with ice cream.  Mmmm!  [Crumble recipe is on the recipe page... somewhere.]

Other baking this week included a very special banana cake.  Mr J has earned the distinction of being the first person in the family [besides the mama!] to have a hand in making his own birthday cake!

What's on the table?

Finally returning with a Thursday food post after a few weeks' hiatus!  Need to do something normal right now after the emotional strain of the last week so here goes.

My favourite meal this week was Tuesday's tea: homemade cheese and onion quiche, warm from the oven; watercress and rocket salad dressed with olive oil and red wine vinegar; steamed peas and courgettes [zucchini] with olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic; and steamed broccoli.  Mmmm!

Baking... this weekend it's going to be cheesecake for Dan's cousin's birthday, flavoured with a bit of lemon and, for a tasty twist, the insides of a vanilla pod.  Last weekend I made Nigella's incredibly dark Guinness cake with its addictive creamy topping as a treat for our friend Beth, who's off to the States for three months.  The week before that it was Andrea's chocolate oil cake for our friend Kemp's birthday.  That cake... it was my most favourite yet.  I have to confess, I've been drifting away from the tried and tested legendary chocolate fudge cake in favour of Andrea's slightly healthier version.  Anyway, I made it with coconut oil, and sandwiched it together with a vanilla butter icing.  This wasn't just any vanilla butter icing, though.  It had two tablespoons of finely ground fresh coffee folded into it.  And that's not all.  I melted a bar of Green and Black's espresso chocolate, stirred it into the remaining vanilla butter icing, and iced the cake with it.  Finely ground fresh coffee grounds adorned the top of the cake. Scrumptious doesn't even begin to describe the levels of flavour in that cake.  Of course, if you don't like coffee, forget about it.  But for those of us who do... Oh. My. Goodness. 

I actually used organic Swiss decaf beans for all the ground coffee in the cake, to minimise the caffeine impact.  However, the Green and Black's bar definitely contained large amounts of caffeine, and so did the cocoa in the cake, so... it's possible that the caffeine content was still dynamically high.  I don't even want to think about what would happen if I gave that cake to my kids!

What's on the table?

Better late than never!  It's been one of those weeks. Going backwards across the last hectic ten days isn't easy, and I'm trying to remember what we've eaten.

We had some of the usuals: vegetable chilli and rice, and chickpea curry with rice.  The latter almost filled the huge stainless steel pot and fed twelve of us: three adults and nine hungry children.  I'm fighting the urge to "name" that pot.  It has such a big, shiny personality all its own and deserves to be named.

We tried out a new dish and it was a yummy success.  I followed this recipe for Coconut Chilli; but cooked it with slightly less liquid so it could be served over rice instead of as a soup.  This is a warming chilli with plenty of flavour.  Pieces of raw coconut, which I added at the end, gave a creamy chewiness that was a perfect contrast to the soft beans and spicy sauce.  We ate this with rice and an avocado and tomato salad.  Mr J, who normally finds himself loudly suspicious of any new recipe, spooned up his meal in record time without comment.  Though that might have been because we had a special treat waiting for us afterwards.  Mmmm.... pumpkin pie!  This is the recipe I use for pumpkin pie.  I don't change a thing, apart from dumping in plenty of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and freshly grated nutmeg instead of pumpkin pie spice.  I love pumpkin pie... and always have.

I'm currently planning a gargantuan clear-out of our house, ready to banish the piles of tidy clutter once and for all. There's a sense of excitement mixed with trepidation: what will I find underneath all that stuff?  How many books do we actually own? Where will our excess belongings go? I wish the American yardsale tradition was accepted here; it would be so much easier than trying to individually list each item on eBay.  Merely imagining the culturally ridiculous scenario of a few tables of stuff for sale, set up in our king bed-sized front garden, is enough of a damper to stop me from attempting it in reality.

And any specific food idea for this week?  Put Oscar to work making beetroot and carrot juice! 

What's on the table?

Peppery, fresh rocket is one of my favourite salad leaves.  Lovely mixed with spinach or watercress, but just as nice on it's own, rocket's strong flavour complements Italian food like pizza or pasta.

We've had fresh green salad every day now for the last week.  When our veg box arrived yesterday, one of the first things I noticed was the bag of rocket.  And it's accompaniment, a snacking slug.  As much as I dislike creepy crawlies, it's a small comfort to see them hanging around fresh vegetables or fruit. At least I know that rocket wasn't soaked in pesticides.

Apparently rocket is also known as arugula. Any North Americans familiar with this?  

I sent a few envelopes of organic rocket seeds to my mother a few weeks ago, illegally, so I thought, padding out the packet with plenty of Pukka teabags to disguise the deed.  However, I did some research [afterwards, as usual] and discovered that seeds aren't apparently considered restricted goods.  Royal Mail's only banned biological substance is human and animal material.  Understandably.  In international post, that is.  However, these items are permitted "to be carried within the UK provided strict conditions are met."  What?  I mean, why? Actually, I don't even want to know!

Anyway, back to rocket.  I've also been giving Oscar handfuls of this spicy leaf to munch.  I mean, juicing it.  Yummy! 

What's on the table?

When my vegetable box arrived yesterday, I was excited to see more fresh garlic bulbs!  The first one appeared in last week's box.  Fresh garlic is beautifully white, with purple lines through the outer bulb.  Inside, the garlic cloves are creamy and strong; crushing them in the garlic press produces an intensely powerful mass of flavour. 

These garlic cloves went into the sauce for our enchiladas yesterday.  They were stirred into an organic pasta sauce for a "ready meal" on Sunday.  They were present in Saturday's chicken pot pie.  And there were one or two raw cloves mashed into last Thursday's mashed potatoes with onion.  So, yeah, we eat a lot of garlic.  That's a good thing!  Check this out...

Pharmacological Activity: The healing power of garlic is recognized through Chinese folk traditions dating back thousands of years. Garlic contains multiple compounds and antioxidants including organosulfur compounds (diallyl sulfides), which are believed to be responsible for most of the pharmacological and antimicrobial actions. Garlic is a proven broad-spectrum antibiotic that combats bacterial, intestinal parasites, and viruses. It can lower blood pressure and blood cholesterol, discourage dangerous blood clotting, lower chances of cancers (especially stomach cancer). Garlic is a good cold medicine, acts as a decongestant, expectorant, antispasmodic, and anti-inflammatory agent. It has antidiarrheal, estrogenic, and diuretic activity and appears to lift mood.
Eating Tips: High doses of raw garlic have caused gas, bloating, diarrhea and fever in some. To fight bacteria, raw garlic is better. However cooking does not diminish garlic's blood thinning and other cardioprotective capabilities, and in fact, may enhance them by releasing antithrombotic ajoene. As a cancer fighter, raw garlic may be better than cooked ones. Eat garlic both raw and cooked for all around insurance.


Because we're so used to eating it, we probably won't notice [but you might!] the strong essence we're breathing out!  If you want to eat more garlic but are afraid of having the breath to go with it, eat fresh parsley post-garlic consumption.  It apparently helps reduce the smell.


I like to drink Pukka's herbal Cleanse and Detox teas after a particularly garlicky meal, as I've found they help in the digestion of spicy foods.  Cleanse has predominantly nettle and fennel flavours, while Detox has aniseed, fennel, and licorice; it's my favourite at the moment.


In baking news, I found out that the sour cream coffeecake I've been making for over ten years in the assumption that it was my great-grandma's recipe, is not, in actual fact, that time-honoured recipe!  Instead, my recipe is a more healthy version made by Grandmother [daughter of the afore-mentioned great-grandma.]


I'm posting the unabridged version on my recipe page.  However, I'll just mention that I made one yesterday that had half a cup of cocoa in it.  Cinnamon cocoa crunch coffeecake.  Oh yes.

What's on the table?

We're in the midst of our annual spring heat wave.  Sun, temperatures in the seventies (F) /twenties (C), clothes drying on the line, dust clouds in our football ravaged grass deprived back garden, and very tired children tucked up in bed at the end of an outdoor day.

I haven't felt much cooking inspiration.  I've been outside enjoying the weather, and standing with Coo while she jumps up and down on the "tampoline".  

Daddy cooked vegetable chilli and rice on Sunday; and we've also eaten lentil soup, vegetable and chickpea curry with rice, and pizzas made with Biona pre-packaged pizza bases.  I do like making my own pizza crust [with my mother's special family recipe], but have wanted to try out these pizza bases for a while.  I found them at a shop in Wales last week.  They were just right - yummy!

Tonight, I made mashed potatoes with onions and cheese, and we ate these alongside a pile of very lightly steamed, crunchy fresh vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and runner beans.  I dressed the vegetables with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and olive oil.  They were delicious!

As it's Easter weekend, I'll be mixing up some almond cookie dough and making a big cookie to decorate for Easter Day.  This is a family tradition started by my mom when I was very small.  I think, this year, that I'll put lemon peel in the almond-essenced dough.  Mmmm.... 

I'm also planning on mixing up a big batch of pancakes for breakfast on Saturday.  We have housework and garden work planned for the day, and will need some substantial meals to keep us going!

Off to "Potales" - Coo's word for Pilates - tonight.  Sore ribs tomorrow!

What's on the table?

My favourites this week?  Simple.

Scrambled eggs.  Perfectly cooked. Slightly browned underneath, yet not too dry, with a hint of cheese on top and a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper.  Eaten folded onto small, thin pieces of crunchy rye sourdough toast.  With side helpings of barely steamed yet crisp broccoli and raw carrot sticks.

Spicy chickpeas.  Cooked by the Daddy for Mama's Day lunch. Mmmm... tasted even better because I didn't make them!  Eaten with brown basmati rice and lots of love.

Lentil soup.  I make this so often, but love how each time it tastes slightly different, depending on what vegetable are lying around to throw in.  This week it was fairly plain: leeks, celery, onions, carrots and potatoes.  Using a mortar and pestle, I ground about a tablespoon of fennel seeds and added them.  This was a beautiful soup.  The Boys went back for thirds.

Enormous amounts of chickpea and vegetable curry, with rice.  The vegetables were broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and potatoes.  Yummy.  A can of coconut milk added just the right amount of creaminess.  I passed out bowls of leftovers later that evening, and a friend even had a "takeaway" box full.  This is the sort of meal that is even better the next day.

Last but not least was leek and potato soup, eaten with a big bowl of crunchy salad containing cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, and spinach.  

And, for interesting reasons, I am inspired to make some granola.  I haven't made it since last summer, so here's to another adjusted version of Andrea's granola! 

What was on your table this week?  

Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 

either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

We have a YWAM student staying with us this week whose homeland is Northern Ireland.  I've been impressed with how he's eaten everything we eat, even down to drinking Pukka teas with Dan and me!

Last weekend was unceasingly busy. As a family, we journeyed to Wroxeter and Attingham on a sunshiny Friday; at the latter, we walked for three miles through parkland - all six of us, including tiny Coo!

The remainder of the weekend was occupied with friends visiting; housecleaning; and garden work that comprised everything from bonfires to carpentry.  Fortunately, late on Thursday evening I had filled our soup pot with minestrone, and that yummy soup was our main meal at the end of each day.

Monday evening we enjoyed a roast chicken for tea.  The bird was organic and free range, with properly formed legs to prove it, and boasting a strong flavour.  I roasted it until the meat was practically falling from the bones. We ate it with homemade gravy, potatoes roasted in olive and coconut oils, and steamed but crunchy vegetables: cabbage, carrots, and broccoli.  Then I boiled the chicken bones in plenty of fresh, cold water and ended up with a chicken stock that formed the basis of our red lentil soup on Tuesday.  We've also eaten vegetable chilli with baked potatoes and cheese; and spicy Mexican rice and beans served with a dark green salad, avocadoes, tomatoes, and green onions. 

Baked treats included chocolate flapjack from this book, Sara's oat bars, and banana muffins [again]. Mmmm! All three taste even better with a cup of hot, fresh coffee, of course.

What was on your table this week?  

Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 

either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

It's been a baking week!  

Hello, banana muffins.  I didn't change this recipe at all, apart from using whole spelt flour in lieu of whole wheat.  It's a true keeper; I know I'll make these again and again.  On a side note, I always puree bananas instead of mashing them; and linseeds/flaxseeds can be ground in a clean coffee grinder.  [Ours is used so often that the linseed oil has no time to deteriorate and flavour the grinder before another load of coffee beans are dumped in! If yours isn't as well-used, you will probably need to wipe it out after grinding linseeds so as to avoid any lingering taste.] I also made carrot and courgette muffins.  These are light but filling, leaving a slightly spicy cinnamon scent in your mouth after each bite.

Other baking forays included a chocolate fudge cake for a friend's birthday.  I didn't eat any of it, but I'm guessing it tasted the same as the other uncounted scores of fudge cakes that have departed my kitchen - totally dark, chocolatey gooey goodness.  Best eaten rarely so as to be fully appreciated!

We've eaten chicken enchiladas, twice; lots of purple cabbage coleslaw; vegetable chilli and rice, twice; and baked potatoes topped with cheesy vegetable casserole [cauliflower, purple sprouting broccoli, onions, leeks, carrots, broad beans, lightly steamed, covered in a cheese sauce and baked].  I'm not sure what caused the double meals this week. We're just not picky about having the same meal twice in a row, and if an abundance of something arrives in our veg box and needs eating up, we'll happily do so - twice or more if necessary.

What was on your table this week?  

Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 

either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

Our soup pot was full again this past weekend with a spicy vegetable, black bean and tomato soup.  It was eaten for several meals, and just kept tasting yummier each time!

We ate potato salad with baked beans [or "trumping tackle", as all three boys now call them!] and a purple cabbage salad.  Also on the table were delicious enchiladas [recipe here, at the bottom of the page] filled with refried brown beans and cheese, eaten with spicy salsa verde and crunchy carrot sticks.  Last but not least was our beloved vegetable chilli and rice.

Finally, I am so excited because this week, after a long wait for a healthy domestic budgeting economy [I mean enough money], we invested in a juicer!  It's a cold press one, and we've called him Oscar.  Mostly because that was, er, already his name.  He's an Oscar VitalMax 900 single gear masticating juicer.  Can you tell I did my research?!

So our first juice this week was a blend of carrots, blood oranges, apples, and fresh ginger.  It had a beautiful pink-orange colour, and a tangy but smooth flavour, with a warming aftertaste from the ginger.  Coo and Mr J preferred it slightly watered down, but The Boys drank it happily as it was.  So did I.  This morning, in honour of St Patrick's Day, we enjoyed a rich, dark green juice of apples, spinach, lemons, and cucumber.  I'm wishing I could share photos of these beautifully coloured juices, but my camera is under the weather!

What was on your table this week?  

Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 

either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

We don't follow the Lenten calendar unless I'm feeling particularly inspired, but we always celebrate Shrove Tuesday with traditional pancakes!  How could we miss it?  Besides, in food shops here, there are displays devoted to ingredients for pancake day: sugar, lemon juice, flour, golden syrup, even frying pans.  Every time I walk past these shelves, I feel inspired.  

There's always a host of possibilities for incorporating pancakes into a meal, but this year I decided to make it a real pancake day and sample both English and American varieties.  For lunch, I cooked thin English pancakes [similar to crepes], spread a slight glaze of blood-orange marmalade [homemade by Nanny] down the middle, and rolled them up.  The Boys, Mr J, and Coo loved eating these.  We finished off our lunchtime with more substantial oatcakes and peanut butter, seeds and raisins, and a blood-orange/kiwi fruit smoothie.  Otherwise, I would have been cooking those thin pancake circles, rolling them up, and placing them on plates for hours before the kids would have felt full!  At tea, we enjoyed much more hearty American pancakes stacked high with maple syrup soaking between the layers.  I've put our recipe on my recipe page today.  You can use any combination of flours but this is our favourite at the moment.

What else have we eaten this week besides pancakes?  Our trip to London included a visit to Vitao, a vegetarian restaurant in Soho that serves a wide range of vegan and raw dishes.  It was yummy.  I can't even tell you what I ate as I wasn't processing anything after two full days of information overload; it was just delicious!  I enjoyed a fresh carrot and ginger juice, sharing it with Coo.

We've also eaten vegetable chilli with rice, and cheesy cauliflower and potato soup with crunchy rye toast and purple coleslaw.  Mmmmn!

What was on your table this week?  

Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 

either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

I own an enormous stainless steel stock pot.  Filled with soup, it makes enough for us and several others to eat that soup for three days.  In the past, I've frozen the extra portions, but I find that nowadays we're eating it the next day, and then the day after that.  We just don't mind eating the same meal again on consecutive days.  

This past weekend, it was filled with minestrone soup.  I remember concocting this tomato-based, Italian-flavoured soup for the first time, twelve years ago, in my parents' kitchen.  I've changed it a little over the years, but usually make it about the same every time.  I'll not give amounts with this; it's not that sort of recipe.  It's just too easy; you can't mess it up.

Saute chopped onions and crushed garlic in olive oil with chopped green and/or red peppers.  Optionally, add a few sliced leeks and celery sticks.  Add dried herbs: bay leaves, oregano, thyme, and basil.  Add chopped vegetables: carrots, courgettes [zucchini], and anything else you think might complement the other flavours.  [Aubergine, fennel, celeriac, etc.]  Stir a few pints of vegetable broth into the veggies and pour in at least a pint of tomato passata [pureed tomatoes].  When the soup is bubbling, add extra water, one or two tins of butterbeans, and [optionally] a few handfuls of dried pasta.  Usually I throw in some broken wholemeal spelt spaghetti.  Simmer the soup for at least another half an hour.  The flavour intensifies as time passes so it tastes best made at least a few hours before serving.  Grate fresh parmesan to sprinkle on top, and eat with a portion of steamed quinoa, or bread, or a salad.

Other food on our table this week included staples vegetable chilli [served with quinoa], and one of my favourites: chickpea vegetable curry, eaten with rice.

My favourite meal has been a hastily prepared late breakfast of chopped apple covered in plain natural yoghurt, with a handful of walnuts and pecans.  Sounds too simple but it's so good.  I munched this while balancing a fretful, teething Coo on one knee and listening to The Boys' narrative versions of what we'd just read about in history: the rather bland story of Ivan the Great adding to early Russia through the defeat of the Mongol and Slav tribes.  Fortunately I finished my food before we moved on to reading an account of the totally gruesome reign of Ivan the Terrible.

What was on your table this week?  
Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - 
either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

Growing in darkness, it expanded silently in its earthy home until the autumn day when it was pulled and stored in coolness in preparation for being eaten.  Last Wednesday, it arrived in my veg box delivery.  A huge, misshapen, grubby, ugly lump.  Celeriac.  It's quite a humble vegetable, in appearance and in behaviour.  It takes on the flavour of other vegetables quite easily when they're cooked together, though it does retain a tiny vestige of its buttery light celery taste.  I peeled and chopped the entire thing, steaming it for a few minutes before adding it to Earth Casserole.  Tangy and raw, beetroot carrot salad was a perfect partner to this casserole.

We have devoured rice this week as if it's never going to be seen again!  Our meals have included:  beans and vegetable rice [full of broccoli and carrots]; a Daddy-cooked Sunday dinner of vegetable chilli and rice; and a massive stockpot full of chicken biryani [Iranian/South Asian rice-based dish] with red lentil dhal on the side.  The chicken in the biryani was the merest hint; we might have had two or three mouthfuls of chicken each.  It's more authentic that way.  My biryani recipe came from a Pakistani friend many years ago.  She used chunks of mutton, not chicken.  On the bone.  And each plateful of biryani boasted, on average, two large chunks of this oily, most interesting meat.  So I think chicken remains a nicely flavourful, non-sheep-or-goat-like alternative.  

For the biryani, you take ten to fifteen black cardamom pods (you can use green if you prefer but the flavour will be slightly different) and crack them open with a mortar and pestle, just crushing them lightly.  Add these -pods and seeds- to olive oil, a few chopped onions and some crushed garlic in a good-sized stock pot.  Saute all of this for two or three minutes, adding in about twenty whole cloves, also cracked and slightly crushed by the mortar and pestle.  The beauty of real biryani is biting into a whole piece of clove and experiencing the incredible burst of flavour that accompanies it!  If you like, you can also break a cinnamon stick in half and throw both halves into the onion mixture.  When you can scent the aroma of all three spices rising from the cooking onions after about three or four minutes, stir in three cups of brown basmati rice.  [You can use regular brown rice.  However, you'll only arrive at the true north Indian flavour with basmati rice.  It has a strong smell, different for anyone accustomed to bland rice but beautifully aromatic.] You can also throw in cooked chicken or another meat at this point, or chickpeas if you'd rather use them.  Pour boiling water over the rice and add two to three teaspoons of freshly ground [get out that pestle and mortar again!] black peppercorns.  For this amount of rice, I usually use about a tablespoon of pepper.  This makes it quite deliciously spicy.  "Real" biryani is very oily and quite strongly flavoured; in order to capture some of this, you have to overdo the spices.  Feel free to add more than the amounts I've stated here if you think it might be more to your taste.  I also add more olive oil than I would normally use in most dishes.  

What's on your table this week?  Leave me a comment with a description of a recent favourite meal - either one you cooked, ate out, or one that was cooked for you! 

What's on the table?

Thursday already!  

This has been a week of plenty.  I can tell because we've eaten leftovers at lunchtime twice.  Normally, I cook just what we need with one serving extra for Dan to take to work the next day.  But over the last week, we've had others eating with us quite a few times, and somehow I've ended up overcompensating and making too much food.  The boys and I don't complain, as we love leftovers.  Mr J [surprise!] doesn't.

We've eaten beans and rice with homemade salsa, Earth Soup [again!], more quinoa tabbouleh, and homemade parmesan/garlic/spelt breadsticks.  Also lentil soup, more carrot and beetroot salad, and a "ready meal" of whole spelt spaghetti from a packet served with a few jars of organic olive pasta sauce.  Lots of avocados, fresh blood oranges, and organic Fiesta apples. (last of the English apples until autumn)  

We've crunched our way through an enormous amount of dry roasted seed mix.  This is an easy recipe from my friend Sue. She gave me a large jar of them at Christmas but I have to admit they didn't last long so I had to learn how to make my own!  Dry roast, in the oven or on the stovetop, about 500g of seeds.  I usually do a mix of pumpkin and sunflower, but you could add others.  When they are crisping up nicely but neither burning nor too crunchy, remove them from the heat and immediately stir in 2-3 TBS organic soy sauce.  Coat the seeds completely and leave them to cool.  This is when the kids dive in, cramming small salty handfuls into their mouths in spite of the stickiness.  When they've completely cooled, they are great sprinkled on morning muesli, eaten as snacks with dried fruit, or on top of a peanut butter and jam covered oatcake.  Yummy and filling, and if you haven't dry-roasted them at too high of a heat, they will retain much of their goodness.

What's on the table?

This week, it's been beautiful, vivid colours... so sad I can't share photos.  Fresh, organic, yummy, crunchy vegetables. 

Beetroot and carrot salad.  Peel four medium beetroot, grate, and toss with three grated carrots.  Stir together 4 TBS red wine vinegar, 1 TBS maple syrup, and 2 TBS olive oil.  Pour dressing over the carrots and beetroot and stir well.  Delicious sweet and sour flavour united with the earthy, rich taste of beetroot.  Add more or less dressing to suit your own preference.

Purple coleslaw.  Slice a medium-sized purple or red cabbage quite thinly.  Add a few grated carrots, and a quarter or a half of a thinly sliced red onion.  Mix with dressing: 3-4 TBS natural yoghurt, 3-4 TBS organic mayonnaise, salt and pepper, 3 TBS red wine vinegar, 1 TBS (or less) of agave or maple syrup, a few teaspoons of dried dill weed.  For a raw version of the dressing, puree: 1 cup fresh [not roasted or salted] cashew nuts, preferably soaked overnight; 1/4-1/2 cup water; 2 TBS cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil; 1/4 cup lemon juice or balsamic vinegar; 2 TBS maple syrup; salt and pepper to taste; and freshly chopped or dried dill weed if you like dill.

Other favourites this week were quinoa tabbouleh, Earth Soup, and our usuals: vegetable chilli with plenty of kidney beans, and a huge chickpea vegetable curry with coconut milk. 

This will be a regular Thursday post from now on.  I'm looking forward to planning our next seven days of food and sharing our eats with you next week!