Twigs and Tofu

A while back, I posted about my simple, basic vegetable soup, the one often made when I’m either lazy or have not been able (or bothered) to do groceries.
While easy and basic, it doesn’t usually have as much flavour as I like in my soups, so I thought I’d try and make it again, this time with some more stuff added.

Ingredients:

To add more flavour, I added a teaspoon of marmite to it, and for extra nutrition, I added the leafy greens (frozen kale and dried something or other from the Chinese supermarket), the beans, and vermicelli, though since the vermicelli wasn’t any kind of wholemeal, I’m not sure those are actually all that nutritious. More to add bulk, really.
I probably added some spices too. A bay leaf, at the very least, and quite possibly some powdered stuff. I can’t really remember what, exactly.

The soup:

While nicer than the more basic version. the marmite didn’t really do that much, at least not on it’s own. So after the first bowl I added some shoyu and a bit of salt, which improved matters considerably.
Still not my favourite soup, but certainly not bad, either.

Somehow the black beans didn’t have much flavour. They probably need to be more closely surrounded by other foods rather than swimming in water. Maybe I’ll make some kind of chilli with the rest of them. Something where the other flavours can stick to them better.

Yesterday my aunt invited me over for dinner and since it was the anniversary of the Rotterdam Blitz, thought it would be nice if we’d go to something commemorative afterwards.

There was something at Plein 1940, a showing of old video footage from shortly after the bombing (It’s very strange looking at piles of rubble with roads through and people walking around. Hard to believe Rotterdam ever looked like that, and not that long ago, either), an older guy sharing his experiences and a song, and the mayor starting the lights that marked the fireline while we got to listen to Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, a piece of music which I now rather love. (Here’s a YouTube link to it. Go listen!)
It was quite impressive and I wonder how I managed to completely miss this event in all my previous Rotterdam-years. After looking at some pictures from last year, with the lights and the clouds making things look rather sci-fi, I rather regret not knowing about it.
I can’t wait until the plaques marking the fireline are up and I can walk it. Though the lights were pretty, it wasn’t easy to see the exact fireline from where I was standing.

Anyway, to the food. This is, after all, a food blog.
Since my aunt would probably not be home to eat the leftovers before they’d go bad, she gave them to me, which was very nice. She’d made some really cool food. Something beet-y, which she served with lettuce and avocado, and something pumpkin-y, which was served with a little oil ans some nuts.

The food:

I only have bits of what we ate together, but it’s still a pretty good meal. Now I just have to remember to return her containers and lend her that cookbook I bought a while back. It has the sort of recipes she’d like and I love encouraging people to cook more vegan things.

Recently I was reading Renee’s Gluten-Free vegan blog, where I came across this smoothie recipe.
While it sounds like an absolutely delicious smoothie, I didn’t make it. Mostly because I had practically none of the ingredients on hand.
It did, however, remind me that I had some probiotic powder laying around. I rarely use it because it’s a bit weird just mixed with water, but now I learned that it could be nice, or at least neutral, when added to smoothies.

Ingredients:

Pretty much the basic smoothie stuff, with the probiotics as a new thing.

Smoothie! (Taken before the 30mins wait)

The probiotics package instructed waiting half an hour before drinking the water+powder, so I figured the same would go for fruit+powder.

After a generous half hour, I had another look. It had gone a little weird, with a thick and bubbly layer on top. It kind of reminded me of injera but a little more fluid. It didn’t look icky, but it did look like it would be nicer if I mixed it up again, so I attacked it with my trusty immersion blender again, which made everything look like normal again.
It also smelled oddly like the batter for the banana pancakes out of Vegan Vittles I made occasionally shortly after I went vegan.
Probably the only thing I ever really made from any of the recipe books I own…
Anyway. Though both foods contain banana, it was still very strange to have this smoothie smell like that batter. I am now wondering if I ever chucked blueberries into the batter. I can’t remember if I did.

Last week I finally played with that pumpkin and root veg I had had laying around for ages. I had bought an extra sweet potato since the pumpkin:root veg ratio seemed a little off to me

The veg:

I chucked in a bunch of spices (cinnamon and nutmeg, probably. Can’t remember what else) and I think also one of those giant garlic cloves.

The result:

Tasty food.
Since I had done some ajvar-rice cake snacking during preparation, I wasn’t too hungry, so only ate about half of what I made and froze the rest.
It’s nice having food like that waiting for you in the freezer.

Since I can be a bit of a klutz with the immersion blender, there were orange spots all over the kitchen to replace the red ones from the beety food earlier.
I’ve thought about it before, but now I really think I should maybe get my hands on some larger cooking pots. I could not fit all of the pre-blended food into one pan, so had to use my small pan as well. It worked out after going at it with the immersion blender, but it would’ve been easier to just have one large pan.
Will look for one soonish.

When I did my grocery shopping, I came across some atriplex hortensis leaves, which is also known as Garden Orache, Red Orach, Mountain Spinach, and French Spinach, apparently. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a bunch of purple leaves with a slight spinach-y taste. I have no idea if they’re commonly eaten anywhere in this day and age though apparently some variation (and there are a good many) of this plant was eaten by social outcasts in Job’s day. Heh.
It’s fun, going all biblical on your food. Provided I don’t have to eat matzes, at least. I should make me some lentils again.

Anyway, back to leaves. Purple ones. All rich and fancy-looking, those. And quite tasty.

Pic:

I don’t really know what to do with them, so I made a basic salad with all my pretty purple leaves, a tomato, and some spices and olive oil.

Pre-salad

Salad:

Yum!
I think I used a little too much oil, though. I’m not used to using oil much anymore, and generally don’t bother too much with dressings and the like, so I would’ve probably enjoyed it more without the oil. My lips are all greasy now.

While tasty, this is salad is hardly a meal. Since I once again neglected to do any dishes (beyond rinsing whatever I’d need for my legumes), I had that nice capucijner food again.

I had intended to play with the pumpkin yesterday, but since that would require doing dishes, I decided I needed a little snack first to avoid getting grouchy while cooking my dinner.

While I was grabbing my rice cakes and jar of ajvar, I saw the tofu strips in the fridge, remembered the spinach in the freezer, and decided that those four things could make a proper meal. One which wouldn’t involve me having to do any dishes.
Score!
(Will have to do them today, though…)

Four things:

Ever noticed that most of my unprepared food pictures have four foodie things on them? It’s not on purpose or anything, and the end result generally contains more than four things, what with me adding all sorts later, but it is amusing.

I considered adding some garlic to the spinach, but I found out the bulb of garlic consisted of only four cloves.
Four pretty damn large cloves.
Since I don’t yet know whether I can use half a clove and store the rest (anyone know this?) and I didn’t want to smell terribly garlicy later, I thought I’d go without.

Mega cloves:

Rice cakes and ajvar: Easy food. Just spread the latter on the former, taking care not to spill any on, say, one’s trousers.

Result 1:

Nice, easy, tasty. Yay!

The spinach was a little more work, but not much. It mostly took a little more time, but a lot of that could be spent watching television. Originally I’d intended to just fry the lamelles de tofu légèrement épicées and munch them while waiting for the spinach to defrost, but as they were a bit salty and, as I had expected, rather bland, I thought I’d better eat them with something else so I added them to the spinach later on.
Though I did technically munch about half of them while waiting for the spinach to get to the appropriate temperature.
I’m like that.

Apart from the bland tofu bits, I also added some shoyu, sesame seeds, a few drops of sesame oil, and some of that Chinese 5-spice stuff to the spinach.

Result 2:

It was good. Most of the time I didn’t much taste the spices and sesame stuff, though. Maybe I didn’t stir it well enough.
Will try adding them earlier next time.

Since we were too lazy to attack the pumpkin and didn’t feel like eating spaghetti again, we made some more rice with some more beans.

Ingredients used this time around:

As you can see, we did not use the exact same ingredients as we did previously. We used peas instead of sweet corn, added some supposed-to-be-spicy Alpro tofu strips (yes, I did buy a second container. The lightly spiced one, which probably lacks any kind of spice, seeing as this “spicy” one wasn’t anywhere near too spicy for my pepper-hating boyfriend), and totally forgot about the kale.
Still, it was good.

All mixed up:

This here is my dish, with the rice and beans hidden mostly under a tomato (cut up, visible on the left), not-too-spicy curry spice mix (that yellow-y patch in the middle), curry gewürz (that brown-red sauce on the left. Probably not the best of foods, seeing as the first ingredient is glucose-fructose syrup), and some harissa to make up for the lack of spicy from the tofu strips and the curry spice mix (the bright red blob near the tomato).
There’s still a little bit of rice and beans visible down South, between the tomato and the curry gewürz, to show what my boyfriend’s dish looked like.
Mine was probably tastier, though.

We spent part of the evening watching BSG (I’m only at late s2, so spoil me and die. srsly), and broke out the snack foods after we’d finished our rice and beans. Mostly Shanghai nuts and some chocolate, though I had intended to finally pop some corn and eat it with nutritional yeast. I’ve been told that stuff is good.
Will do so later.

My boyfriend is staying with me at the moment. As he’s a big fan of rice and beans and I’m rather into easy foods, the first meal we cooked for ourselves was, well, rice and beans.
Something more orange would’ve suited the day better, but I was too lazy to make something with that pumpkin I have laying around.

Ingredients:

Guess which supermarket was open on Koninginnedag?

All I did was cook the rice according to the instructions and chuck the rest of the ingredients in the pan. After mixing it up properly and letting things get to the appropriate temperature, we ate it.

Rice and Beans:

Though we both enjoy the basics of this dish, I generally prefer to add some things while my boyfriend thinks anything beyond rice, baked beans, sweet corn, peas, and tomato ketchup is unnecessary and diminishes his enjoyment of the dish.
He didn’t mind me adding some cubes of kale, but didn’t want any of the spices. Lucky for me it’s easy to add some random spice mixes and some harissa to the food on my plate, or it would’ve been rather bland to me.

~-*-~

One of the reasons my boyfriend is visiting at the moment is to attend the wedding of a friend of mine.
We had a great time, and my friend, who is a vegetarian herself and most thoughtful, had made sure there was plenty of vegan food available.
Even one of the cakes was vegan!
And it was a tasty one, too. I don’t know the exact ingredients, but pineapple was very present.
All of the other people, most of whom were omnis, were very cool about veganism as well. Sometimes people can get a little defensive when you merely mention you’re vegan, but not the people at this wedding.

Since there was a lot of left-over food and since my friend and her new husband were leaving for their honeymoon the next day, everyone got to take some food home.
We got to take home the cake (already eaten and very much enjoyed) and some of the brightly coloured coconutty balls. I’m sure she told me what they were called, but I can’t remember it. They’re way tasty, though.

Picture:

More sidebar ramblings.

After making me a tag page I got rid of the tag cloud widget, giving me some more vertical pace on my lovely sidebar.

Now all I have to do is make sure I keep the tag page current…

Sorry to be spamming you all, but I was just checking my stats page, and found someone found my page while googling “eating with the rabbits” (quotation marks not mine).
Why they went to my page rather than Bonnie’s page, I don’t know.