One of my favorite ways to use up veggies is to add extra veggies to a likely looking recipe. I think most recipes are improved by adding more veggies, with improved taste and definitely superior nutrition! I found a couple of good candidates for this treatment when I was deciding what to make for dinner last night.
First, I have been trying to make more soups, to get more veggies into our diet, and now that I am working at home, I can actually use my crockpot (which really irks me--all the recipes have 8 hour or less cooking times, which is too short for the days that I got to the office), so I went to my copy of Robin Robertson’s Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, and found this awesome recipe for French White Bean and Cabbage Soup.
I mostly followed the recipe, but the biggest change I made was to add a bunch of veggies. Marsha brought me some extra veggies last week, including some red bell peppers and one last zucchini. My zucchini plant died long ago, but they had one more plant that reseeded itself and produced a few late squash. So, I chopped those up and added them to the skillet for the intial sauté. Here is a picture of the veggies waiting to be softened (except the garlic):
As you can probably tell, I sliced up some baby carrots, rather than using a big carrot. I like to buy those for the kids lunches and fast cream of carrot soup. I also substituted 8 fingerling potatoes, some golden and some red, sliced thinly, for the Yukon Gold potato, and I added just a bit more thyme than the recipe called for, because I love thyme. I did not add the liquid smoke, because I can never seem to find that in the store. Here’s my bowl of the finished product:
For the main dish, I found this awesome recipe on the Vegetarian Times website. These days, I am always looking for recipes for greens, both because they are so healthy, and because I have a bunch of turnip greens in the garden that I want to use. Again, I mostly followed the recipe, but I did add an Anaheim chili to the onions and garlic. I also added a whole can of tomato sauce and water to make the full liquid amount, since I was out of veg stock, and a lot of extra garlic. I meant to add some baby spinach at the end, but after running to the Halloween store, then Target, then back to the Halloween store, then to Trader Joe’s, where I bought soy sausage, but forgot to buy more veg stock, I was feeling a bit frantic at the end of the cooking time, and I totally forgot. Next time. Here is my plate of this dish:
Predictably, the boy liked both dishes--he helped with the greens and sausage--but the girl was not a huge fan. I am going to wear her down eventually, I know.
Other things I have done lately with turnip greens and Anaheim chilis:
Tofu scramble: I used the recipe from Vegan Brunch, adding the chili with the onions in the beginning, and the greens near the end of the cooking time
This Yummy Yam curry: This did call for greens, but really, there aren’t many recipes that I don’t find suitable for a nice mild chili or pepper.
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