With the first real snowfall yesterday, the season of winter is effectively upon us. I really enjoy eating soup when it’s cold, but this can be somewhat challenging as a vegetarian, since even “vegetable” soups are often made with either chicken or beef stocks.
Fortunately, making your own soup is actually pretty easy to do and doesn’t take very long. You can store it in your refrigerator to have soup for a few days, even.
Here’s how I make it!
Recipe coming tomorrow!
Here it is!
As promised yesterday, here is the recipe for Zucchini bread passed down through my family. I don’t know the origin of this particular recipe, so it might be from a cookbook, or someone else, or it could be a variation.
Regardless, it’s YUMMY.
Preheat your oven for 350 Fahrenheit.
In a mixing bowl, and you’ll probably want to use a stand mixer or electric beaters for this, blend: Continue reading
Green Gear is a series where we discuss different kitchen tools, how they can be used with Veg*n cooking, and some other helpful tips about them.
We bought our first Food Processor when we got married, a little over two years ago. It was an Oster model; I think it held 10 cups. We bought it with some wedding money.
After we got it, we quickly began to wonder how we had ever functioned without one. We used it so much, it rarely sat clean and dry on our counter for long, and more often than not would be rinsed in the sink only to be used again immediately.
We used it so much that after about 2 years, the handle broke and it had to be jury-rigged to function for the last 5 months. Then we got our new beautiful model (pictured): Continue reading
Happy Valentine’s Day! This is one of my all-time favorite dishes.
Fortunately, this is one of the entrees that has a terrific homologue in the domain of vegetarianism. The recipe we use is from the New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, a book Mel picked up either at a library book sale or through paperbackswap.com. The recipe goes like this: Continue reading
I brew my own Ginger Ale.
I started doing this, I think, in February 2008. Melissa had bought a book called Wild Fermentation, which was about using bacterial/yeast cultures to brew drinks and make food through fermentation. I’ve made over a dozen batches, and although I’m still improving on my recipe, it tastes pretty good!
My Ginger Ale recipe is essentially three food ingredients + the micro-organism culture.
That’s it.
The carbonation comes from the fermentation of sugar, via the Wild Yeast. This is the same kind of fermentation process that brewers use to make ethanol (drinking alcohol) although this particular process / yeast culture does not produce a substantial amount of alcohol. (If there is any, it is barely noticeable, and largely depends on how long you let it ferment). The main by-product is carbonation (CO2) and awesome. Continue reading
Root Beer, version 1 (1 June 2008)
Boil the following ingredients:
6 oz Sassafrass tea extract (Saffrole free! This is important!)
1/4 oz Anise seeds, ground to a powder
2 cups white sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses
2 qts water
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature and add:
2 qts water
1 tbsp Vanilla Extract
4 drops Wintergreen Essential Oil (dissolve in 2 tsp of Honey first)
Ginger bug(*)
(* The ginger bug is a wild yeast culture grown with sugar and grated ginger root — I’ll do a separate post about growing that. It’s necessary for fermentation.)
I’ve let mine brew for 6 days so far, and cracked open my first bottle yesterday, and second bottle today. I have one last bottle in the fermenter (a cabinet) right now, which I’ll pull tomorrow, to see if 7 days makes a difference.
The flavor is pretty good – the molasses flavor is a little too heavy, but it carbonated well and had a nice foamy head. I’m going to try using half as much (1/8 cup) next batch. The wintergreen wasn’t prominent enough, so I’ll try increasing that by 50% (6 drops). The sassafrass flavor was very abundant as well, I can probably scale that back a little bit. Beyond those three alterations, this was remarkably good for a first batch — if I were to give it to someone without telling them what it was, they would surely know it was Root beer.
So changes for version 1.1: