Roasted Vegetable Bowl

I had some success with a new recipe tonight and while I wasn't blown away by it, it was very good for using ingredients that I'm not particularly fond of in the first place. It used things from my bountiful basket and ingredients I've been trying out and already had in my kitchen (namely chickpeas, nutritional yeast, and  tahini paste, though it didn't have an overly-eastern taste to it).

A minor note before I launch into the recipe: I cooked dried chickpeas in chicken stock (you can use vegetable if you're doing vegetarian/vegan) and it made them SUPER tasty compared to the usual canned-fare!  Though I would recommend rinsing them before starting the soak (I forgot that step!)

Roasted Vegetable Bowl

Ingredients:
For Roasting:
-1.5 cups cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or one 15oz can)
-4 Tablespoons melted butter (divided)
-2 Tablespoons lemon juice (divided)
-2 teaspoons garlic powder (divided)
-1 teaspoon sea salt (divided)
-1/4 teaspoon black pepper (divided)
-1 head broccoli, chopped into bite sized pieces
-1 head cauliflower, chopped into bite sized pieced
For the Dressing:
-1/2 cup almonds, soaked
-2 Tablespoons lemon juice
-1 Tablespoon tahini paste
-1 Tablespoon garlic, minced
-1/4 teaspoon sea salt
-1/4 cup nutritional yeast
-3/4 cup vegetable or chicken broth
Top with:
-2-3 Tablespoons chopped almonds
Instructions:
1. Soak almonds in a bowl for 8 hours (or boil for 45 minutes).
2 Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line two large baking sheets with foil. Prepare with EVOO spray.
3. Combine 2 T butter, 1 T lemon juice, 1 t garlic powder, 1/2 t sea salt, and 1/8 t black pepper.  Drizzle over broccoli and cauliflower.  Stir to coat.  Place on a baking sheet and set aside.
4. Combine 2 T butter, 1 T lemon juice, 1 t garlic powder, 1/2 t sea salt, and 1/8 t black pepper. Drizzle over chickpeas. Stir to coat and place on baking sheet.
5. Roast veggies and chickpeas for 15 minutes. Give the pan of chickpeas a gentle shake to rotate. Roast and additional 10 minutes.
6. Prepare the dressing by placing all the dressing ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth.  Set aside.
7. Mix roasted vegetables and chickpeas together and serve into bowls.  Drizzle dressing over the veggie mixture and garnish with chopped almonds

Special note: This dish serves 4.  If you wish to serve more people or just want leftovers, double the "For Roasting" ingredients but not the dressing.  The dressing recipe makes much more than you use with 1 recipe's worth of roasted vegetables.

Vegetarian Enchiladas

So in the past, when I've made enchiladas, the filling has had sour cream, chicken stock, cream of mushroom soup, cheddar cheese, canned diced green chilies, and shredded chicken. It's a dairy, calorie overload of fantasticness!  Top it with some homemade guacamole and my eyes just kinda role back into my head.  However it doesn't fit into the veggie-filled goodness I've been trying to transform our dinner times into and was inspired to try something different when I received 6 green chilies in my bountiful basket this week!

I was so pleased with how these enchiladas turned out and hope you will give them a try!

Vegetarian Enchiladas

Ingredients:

Rice:

-1 cup brown rice

-2 cups vegetable or chicken broth

-1 Tablespoon lime juice*

-1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

-1/2 teaspoon cumin

-1/2 teaspoon onion powder

-1/4 teaspoon chili powder

-1/8 teaspoon salt

Sauce:

-6 chili peppers, stemmed, seeded, and chopped

-1 28 oz can diced tomatoes

-5 cloves garlic, minced

-3 cups vegetable or chicken broth -reserve 4-6 Tablespoons

-sea salt and pepper to taste

-1/4 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

-3 teaspoons sugar**

-2 Tablespoons corn starch -dissolved in reserved chicken broth

-2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

-3 peppers (green, red, yellow or orange), stemmed, seeded, and sliced

-2 medium onions, halved and sliced into slivers

-1 can black beans***

-12 flour tortillas****

-1 cup shredded cheddar cheese to top (optional)

Instructions:

1. To cook the rice, combine broth, garlic powder, cumin, onion powder, chili powder, and salt.  Pour over rice in cook in a rice cooker (If you don't have a rice cooker, saute the rice in couple tablespoons of melted butter in a large sauce pan. Add broth mixture, stir, cover and cook until water is mostly absorbed).

2. In a large saucepan, combine the chilies, tomatoes, garlic, broth, salt pepper, vinegar and sugar.  Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat.

3. Reduce the heat and maintain a gentle, constant low simmer for 10 minutes.

4. Stir in the cornstarch mixture and continue to cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Taste test the sauce.  If it is too spicy, add small amounts of sugar until you reach the desired taste.

6. Remove from heat, stir in 2 cups cheddar cheese, and set aside.

6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

7. Prepare 9x13" baking dish by spooning some of the sauce mixture into the pan and coating the bottom and edges.

8. Fill a tortilla with rice, beans, peppers, onions, and top with sauce.  Fold and overlap tortilla ends as best you can (I always end up with too much stuff and have only like, a 1/2" overlap!).  Repeat with all the tortillas and arrange in a row in the pan.

9. Pour remaining sauce over the top of the enchiladas and using a spoon, move sauce around so that all the tortilla edges have some of the liquid on it (keeps it from getting too crispy in the oven).

10. Top with 1 cup cheddar cheese and bake for 30 minutes.

*I was honestly planning on doing more, but my lime juice was empty :-(  Oh! And there's a cilantro allergy in our family so I don't cook with it, but I LOVE it and if I could, I would go NUTS with fresh cilantro right here in the rice!

**As soon as my sugar stash from my Christmas cookie baking is gone, THIS will become organic cane sugar :-D

***As always, my "can" of beans is actually beans I've soaked, cooked in a crock pot, measured with a 14.5 oz can and poured into a freezer bag.  Someday my tomatoes and broth will be this too... *sigh* hence the title of my blog containing the phrase "baby steps" ;-)

****Enough stars for you yet?? But really: I used whole grain.  If you wanted to go gluten-free you could use corn tortillas, but honestly, I'm not a fan of corn and it doesn't seem to be a taste I can manage to acquire.

Awe!! I just had the horrible realization I meant to serve these with avocado slices on top... DRAT!!

Well... even so. They were still really good.  There shall be fights over the leftovers!

Remy's Ratatouille

Apparently the dish the Remy makes in the Disney movie Ratatouille is not a traditional ratatouille.  But this awesome hack of the dish he does make got rave reviews in my house tonight (well... to be honest, four gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up and the littlest pair of thumbs in our household gave it two teary-eyed thumbs down but that's a whole other blog in and of itself...).  My son took THIRDS and I got a happy groan out of my husband on the first bite and AGAIN on the second bite!  I made extra of this so we could have it again another night, yeah... that's not gonna to happen.  It's pretty much gone!

Plus it's a very pretty and colorful dish, and it has goat cheese.  Who doesn't like goat cheese??

I was able to use three red peppers, two yellow squash, and a small onion from my bountiful basket in this recipe!


Remy's Ratatouille
What you Need:
-2 10" oven-safe baking dishes
-parchment paper
-EVOO cooking spray
-4 cups chicken or vegetable stock
-2 cups brown rice
-1 Tablespoon butter
-1/2 medium onion, diced
-2 garlic cloves, minced
-1 14oz can diced tomatoes
-basil,  parsley, and thyme to taste (again, I go nuts on the basil and easy on the parsley and thyme)
-1 egg plant (or 2 Italian Eggplants)
-2 zucchini
-2 yellow squash
-3 long, skinny-ish red bell peppers
-1/4 cup EVOO
-1 teaspoon thyme
-1 teaspoon dill weed
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-1/4 teaspoon black pepper
-AT LEAST 6oz soft goat cheese (and I would say "optional" here to make it vegan-friendly, but it's the contrast of the cheese with the other flavors that makes this dish so phenomenal!)
Instructions:
1. Set a piece of parchment paper on top of each baking dish and use a pencil to trace around the lip of the dish and cut the circle just inside the line so it'll fit nicely over the top of your ratatouille and set aside.
2. Combine the stock and rice in a rice cooker and start it (If using a saute pan, melt an additional 2 Tablespoon of butter in pan on a medium/high heat, add rice and stir for a few minutes and then add the stock.  Cover and simmer on medium/low for 30-40 minutes or until most of the water has been absorbed.  I also recommend moving this step to while the ratatouille is in the oven if you decide to prepare it this way)
3. In a small sauce pan, melt butter and saute onion on medium/high heat.  When tender, add garlic and stir.  Add tomatoes, basil. parsley, and thyme and stir.  Reduce heat and allow to stew and reduce while you prepare the olive oil and cut vegetables
4. Combine olive oil, thyme, dill weed, salt, and pepper in a small bowl and set aside
5. Trim the ends off eggplant, yellow squash, zucchini, and red peppers.  Carefully remove the core from the inside of the red peppers, leaving the tube intact.
6. Thinly slice the yellow squash, zucchini, and red peppers (and if you got Italian eggplants, those as well) into thin rounds, about 1/16th of an inch.  If you have a normal eggplant, cut the narrow top into rounds just like the other vegetables. Then quarter the thick part of it length-wise and cut the quarters into 1/16th inch slices.
7. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
8. Coat 10" dishes with cooking spray, pour 1/2 the tomato mixture into the bottom of each dish, and arrange slices of vegetables concentrically from the outer edge to the inside of the dish, overlapping so just a small amount of each flat surface is visible, alternating vegetables.
9. Using a basting brush, brush half of the olive oil mixture onto the top of the vegetables in each dish. Cover with parchment rounds and bake for 45 minutes
10. Serve over rice with a dab of goat cheese on top!


Hope you enjoy this scrumptious dish!  I know we did! 

Not Spaghetti

So I'd just like to start by saying that I wish I'd had a video camera to capture the spectacle of me trying to half the spaghetti squash that I used in this awesome recipe. I pulled out my biggest knife and tried to saw into it, without success.  So I lifted the knife probably more than a foot above the squash, trying to get the knife to penetrate the tough skin by hitting it.  This got the knife in about half an inch, and trying to saw on it again would do no more good (can you tell I'm a weakling??).  So now I'm balancing the knife-clad gourd on my cutting board with one hand, straining around behind me with the other hand to open a bottom draw to retrieve my meat tenderizer to bang on the back of the knife which only helped me cut into the squash the width of the knife. My next tactic was to try to drop the gourd onto the cutting board while putting pressure on the knife which ultimately ended with the two halves falling to the floor of my kitchen.

This aside, the recipe was surprisingly good considering that the contents of the dish were 90% plant matter.  Not to mention who doesn't need to add a little to their exercise routine??

I had a request to share some of the recipes that I was trying to use some of the contents of my bountiful basket, so this is my first one. I used the onion and two spaghetti squash.

Not Spaghetti
Ingredients:
-5 cups beef or vegetable stock
-1 cup lentils, rinsed
-4 mushrooms, diced
-1/2 teaspoon black pepper
-4 teaspoons garlic, minced, divided
-2 Tablespoons butter
-1 medium onion, diced
-28 oz can diced tomatoes
-6 oz can tomato paste
-season to taste with basil, oregano, parsley, sea salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce 
  (NOTE:  I go nuts with the basil, easy on the oregano and parsley, salt and pepper are kind of a personal preference as to much much you want or don't want, and we're talking like, 4-5 DROPS of Worcestershire sauce, a little goes a LONG way!)
-2 spaghetti squash, halved and seeds removed
-Shredded Parmesan cheese for garnish (optional)
Instructions:
1. Place stock, lentils, mushrooms, black pepper, and 1 teaspoon of garlic in a sauce pan and cook on medium heat for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. In a sauce pot on medium/high heat, melt butter and saute onions until soft. Stir in garlic. Add Dices tomatoes, tomato paste, basil, oregano, parsley, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.  Stir, cover, and simmer on low.
3.Strain lentil mixture (reserving the stock) and add to the tomato mixture.  If the sauce to too thick for your preference, add some of the stock to thin it down.  Continue to simmer, stirring occasionally, until ready to serve (ideal is 4 hours, though it's still wonderful at 1 hour).
4. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees
5. Carefully pour remaining stock onto a cookie sheet and arrange four halves of squash sliced-side down in the stock.  Bake for 30-40 minutes (other directions said "or until you could pierce the skin with a fork" but it got to the point that the fork was just pushing the skin into the soft meat of the gourd and I figured that was good enough!)
6. Flip halves over and return to the oven for an additional 5 minutes
7. Using tongs to hold the squash still and a fork to scrape, scrape the stringy meat of the gourd into a bowl
8. Serve the sauce over the squash and top with cheese (optional)


Mmmm... I'm eating the left-overs as I write this! SO tasty! :-D I can't wait to try this with tomatoes I've canned myself this summer!!