Lunch Salad in the Park

When the weather is nice, I really enjoy eating my lunch in the park. I like to read at lunch and it's quite nice to sit in the fresh air and relax for a bit in the middle of a hectic work day. I wish I remembered to bring my lunch more than I do.

We don't have anywhere to eat lunch in the building where I'm currently working so it's either bring something cold to eat in the park if it's nice weather or go out to eat somewhere. That pretty much negates bringing leftovers for lunch like I used to do. Sometimes I cheat and go to a coffee shop and order a cheap tea and eat a sandwich or something in there if it's raining. Luckily, we've had some amazing weather out here in Vancouver lately so it hasn't really been an issue.

 

 

I get tired of sandwiches after a while and I've never been a huge salad person. I like my salads full of stuff with just a bit of lettuce as an accent, not as the main ingredient. One thing that really makes salads awesome for me are those Gardein Crispy Tenders. The plain ones or the newer chipotle lime flavor are both great. I'll cook them in the morning while I'm getting ready for work or even sometimes the night before and then chop them up and put them on a salad. That really adds a bit of jazz to the salad!

These things are really great at room temperature and add some extra goodness to wraps, too. Oh yeah, that's another favorite thing to do with those, but I never remember to take a photo when I do it. I eat them too fast. These Crispy Tenders are also really great on a caesar salad if you want a little something extra.

Disclaimer: I totally took this photo over the summer and forgot about it. Vegan MoFo is great for getting me to blog about photos I keep shuffling around on Flickr.

Spring Greens and Rice Soup

So it's spring and summer's right around the corner. I'm loving that the summer farmer's market is open again. We moved a few months ago, too so now the market is in the park just a block from our place. It's pretty awesome to walk over there first thing in the morning on Saturdays and get some fresh produce for the week. Right now there's a plethora of greens and not a huge selection of much else. It makes sense, unless people are growing in a greenhouse it's not the season for harvesting many things for a bit. I'm not complaining, though, I love greens of any sort. It's amazing what wonderful varieties there are to choose from.

So many beautiful, local, organic lettuces are available right now. It can get tiring having salads all of the time, though, as delicious as they can be. Did you ever think of cooking the salad greens? I know, I know. It sounds kind of weird. I thought that at first, too. But, really, when you think about it, what's the difference between steaming some chard or spinach and steaming some spring greens that you'd typically use for a salad? I definitely recommend trying it sometime. You can get such a wonderful varieties of flavor into your greens this way.

I especially like adding some salad greens to soups, much like one of my favorites, the Spring Greens and Rice Soup. I got the idea for this soup from reading something online that talked about adding romaine and butter lettuce to a soup. I was intrigued and immediately concocted this recipe. It's the perfect soup for spring or summer. It's not heavy at all and you can alter the flavor profile by changing the lettuces that you decide to use.

Using risotto rice instead of regular white or brown rice makes the soup taste a bit creamy. It adds quite a bit of awesome to the pot. I would suggest not substituting a different kind of rice. You want the creaminess in the broth and the softness of the arborio rice. Trust me, it's a big difference in this recipe.

If you're not able to get some fresh greens from the farmers market, you can totally use some of those bags of baby lettuces. I've done it that way before and had great success. My favorite combination doing it that way is to use two of the big boxes of lettuce. One of spinach and one of the Earthbound Farms Herb Salad Mix. If you use that one, you don't need to add any fresh herbs because there are already some in there. A nice shortcut, especially if you're trying to make something quick after work. If you're using heads of lettuces, butter lettuce, romaine, radicchio and escarole are all good choices. Maybe use 3 small heads of varying lettuces in addition to some spinach or chard if you're going that route. Just make sure to chop the lettuce leaves coarsely to make them easier to eat.

Oh, did I mention that this recipe comes together is almost no time? Yeah, it's awesome for making on a night when you want something homemade but just don't have the energy to spend an hour chopping and stirring. Plus, this is a one-pot recipe. Not a ton of stuff to clean up, either.

One more thing, use this recipe as a guide. You can add more or less carrots, celery and herbs as you like. Feel free to substitute different herbs or even just buy one of those multi-herb packs and use whatever's in there. This is a really adaptable recipe. Just make sure to keep the broth and rice at the same ratio as I have here since the rice will soak up a bunch of broth, though feel free to add more broth if you want a thinner soup.

Spring Greens and Rice Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons non-dairy margarine or olive oil (I like the buttery flavor that Earth Balance lends to this, but go ahead and use just olive oil if you'd rather.)
1-2 carrots, finely chopped (about 2/3 cup)
2 ribs celery, chopped (about 2/3 cup)
1 small yellow onion, chopped (about 1 cup)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
1 teaspoon salt (if you're using salted vegetable broth, you might skip this and just taste and add salt at the end)
1 bundle of spinach, coarsely chopped (or one of those boxes of spinach leaves)
1large bag of mixed salad greens, any kind, chopped if the leaves are too big (or one of those boxes of mixed greens like these)
6 cups vegetable broth
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 cup arborio rice

Heat the olive oil and margarine in a large soup pot over medium heat. Saute the carrots, celery and onions for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the herbs and salt and cook for another minute. Stir in the greens and cook for 5 minutes.

Add the broth and nutritional yeast and stir. Add the arborio rice and raise the heat to medium-high. Once the soup is just starting to boil, cover and reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer for about 20 minutes.

Tomato Caesar Salad

It's been a gorgeous day in Vancouver today. The sun was shining all day trying hard to warm us up despite the cold wind. It's still a bit cool, but today was the first day so far this year that it's been warm enough to eat my lunch in the park. Awesome. I'm definitely looking forward to many more lunch breaks like that.

For dinner, I think I'll just stick with something simple and fresh and think about those warm summer days on the horizon. I just chopped up some romaine lettuce and heirloom tomatoes and topped it with some balsamic croutons. There's a homemade caesar dressing as well, but I put it on after I took the photos. The salad looks prettier without it, anyway.

I'm looking forward to the farmer's market tomorrow, too. I now live just a block or so from the market at Trout Lake so I have no excuse not to go every week. I'm quite looking forward to seeing what goodies I can discover. I'm hoping to find some fruit for a pie or even some sweet, organic, local strawberries to use in making some strawberry shortcake cupcakes.

My absolute favorite thing from the farmer's market is the garlic. Oh, goodness. Fresh garlic is where it's at.  I'm going to venture into making some more sourdough bread this weekend and I'm thinking of filling the dough with loads of roasted garlic cloves. Yum! I can't wait to see how that'll turn out.

Potato Salad to Rule the Universe

We all want things to eat in the summer that are light and filling and that don't require us to do much cooking. Turning on that oven when it's already an inferno in your place is not fun. I've been doing a lot of experimenting with summer salads lately. I have a bit of an aversion to mayonnaise, as I think I've mentioned before, so let me tell you - I was so excited for this potato salad. It's pretty much a tweaked version of a recipe I saw on Jamie Oliver's show. I was a little skeptical at first for some reason. But really... you shouldn't be. It's amazing. I loved this so much that I just ate a bowl of it for lunch one day instead of just using it as an accompaniment to something else. Yes, it's that good.

The original recipe called for creme fraiche. Interestingly enough I find that most commercial vegan sour creams kinda taste like creme fraiche, so it works out nicely. If you have something that you think might work better to replicate that flavor, then by all means, use that instead. Just steer away from using anything that has that sour tang to it.

Potato Salad to Rule the Universe

12 or so small yellow potatoes
3 Tablespoons capers
1 lemon (for juice and zest)
2 Tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
a handfull of fresh dill, chopped
a few dollops of vegan sour cream

Boil the potatoes in salted water just until they're tender. You don't want them to fall apart. A good test is to stab one or two with a fork until the potato gives easily. Depending on the size of your potatoes, it could be anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes, so do check them every 5 minutes or so. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain them and add them to a large bowl.

To the potatoes, add the capers, juice and zest of your lemon, salt and pepper and olive oil while the potatoes are still hot. Stir it up until the potatoes are well coated and then let the bowl sit on the counter until the potatoes are room temperature. Don't put it in the fridge to cool it in a hurry, though. Part of what you want to happen right here is for the flavors to meld together and seep into the potatoes while it's cooling down. Putting this in the cold of the fridge will stop that from happening as well. Be patient, it won't take too long.

Once everything is room temperature, add the dill and the vegan sour cream and stir it up. How much of the sour cream you add is up to you, I think I used about two-thirds of a container and that seemed to work out nicely. Maybe you want more, maybe you want less. It's your potato salad. :)

Eat and enjoy the awesomeness.

Persimmons & Haiku

I was going to post about fennel today, but I decided to do persimmons instead. One hour to spare to get my Vegan MoFo post in for the day at that! Never let it be said that I'm not dedicated! I just got home from the killer Juliette and the Licks show and even though I still can't hear exactly right just yet, I'm still blogging. Because really, all I need to hear is inside my own head for this.

The other day I was going to talk about persimmons, but I got stuck trying to think of something witty for the title. I was out of funny that day, I guess. So I randomly started petitioning my friends to say something funny about persimmons. One of them told me that I should do a persimmon haiku. Well, I didn't write them, but two of my friends did.

Scott's Haiku:
persimmion unripe
grows wild in japan
tastes bitter

Roman's Haiku x2: (He thought I said permission at first... lol Like the evil friend that I am, I made him do another one with the correct word)
roman likes red cats
permission was not given
to wear them as hats

roman did not use the rules
persimmon he did not use
roman is a dope

So now that we've gotten that out of the way...

I was going to make the persimmon bread over at the Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, but they were almost two dollars each and I couldn't remember how many I would need for the bread. Probably more than I wanted to buy, I'm sure. They were organic and already ripe, though, so that's a bonus.

A lot of people were saying to just eat the fruit like it is or to put it in a salad. I chose to put it in a salad with raspberries, cherry tomatoes and baby romaine lettuce. I drizzled some hazelnut oil, balsamic vinegar and lime juice on top. It was so yummy. I definitely want to eat persimmons again. The flavor was light, but full. Not too sweet, but definitely not an absence of sweetness. Sort of the fruit version of a cupcake without the icing, I guess.

The salad was great, and something I'm going to have again very soon. I just started this cleanse - one of those ones with a ton of pills and liquid herbs to take, but it also restricts my diet a little bit for the two weeks that I'm on it. I can pretty much eat all of the fruits and vegetables that I want (with some restrictions - like no tropical fruits - too much sugar, no mushrooms - they can harbor yeast, and other stuff like that). I'm only allowed to have 20% of my diet be from legumes or other protein sources, even some grains are included in that group. I can eat all of the brown rice, buckwheat and almonds that I want, regardless.

To be extra healthy and cleansy, I also wanted to try and eat raw for at least two of my meals while I'm doing this. I've never really tried to make raw food before (salads don't count), so this is a bit of an experiment. I bought a raw cookbook, which I will review in another post and I'm searching the internet for some easy raw things I can make without a dehydrator or blender. All of my kitchen appliances are in storage at the moment except for my immersion blender and a cheap electric mixer that I picked up. That limits me a bit, unfortunately. Not to mention that some things I can't make because they call for foods that are on my do not cook list.

This weekend is going to be a little difficult. I always bake at least one thing, though usually 2 or 3 on the weekends, especially when it's cold outside like this. I bought a bunch of winter veggies to do something interesting with, so I'm hoping that will help me quell the urge to make cupcakes or bread since I can't eat anything with flour or sugar either. It's not so bad. It's only 5 days in and already I'm starting to feel better.