Clean out the fridge soup

The other day was the day that we pick up a fresh load of (free!) veggies from a local farm, which means that we have to make room for them. How? By eating last week's veggies of course! Our freezer is packed with peppers and kale, and the vegetable crisper had some hot peppers and leeks going mushy. Plus, there was a surplus of potatoes. So I figured I'd just throw it all in a pot and see what happened. The result? Potato and leek soup crossed with kale soup! YUMMMMMMY!

This actually tasted like kale soup, and I think it's a good substitute for vegetarian/vegan crowd. Since kale soup has sausage in it, that's obviously out. However, the potato added a similar texture (biting into something that isn't kale) and the hot pepper added the spice round in the hot Italian sausage we usually get. Curious? Here's the recipe!

Clean out the Fridge Soup (Vegetarian Kale soup)

Olive oil

Kale: not just an alien, it's an amazing leafy green!

1-2 stalks leeks (or one large onion), chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 hot pepper, chopped into small-ish pieces
2 bell peppers, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
2-3 medium potatoes, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 can red kidney beans
1 Tbsp. dried basil
1/2 tsp. chili powder
Salt and pepper to taste
1-1 1/2 cups loosely chopped kale

Coat the bottom of a soup pot with olive oil and heat. Add leeks (or onions, if using) and cook until soft, then add garlic. Let cook 1-2 minutes until the garlic starts to cook a little, then add the hot and bell pepper. Cook until slightly soft and add potato, kidney beans, basil, chili powder, salt, and pepper. Pour in enough water to cover the vegetables by a half inch. Let soup simmer until potatoes are almost done and add kale. When potatoes are tender, serve it up and enjoy!

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This is sort of a hodgepodge soup recipe, however it had a striking resemblance to kale soup when we ate it. I supposed if you wanted to, you could substitute chicken or vegetable stock for the water if you wanted a little extra flavor, but I thought it was just fine on its own. If you want it less spicy you can use less chili powder, or if you wanted it spicier you could even add another hot pepper (for the original, we used one and a half to get them out of the crisper). All in all, this soup was hot, tasty, and perfect for the cooling October weather. Plus, it was super easy.

(image from here)

Procrastination station!

While in the midst of trying to figure out how exactly to do my Linguistics homework, I started looking up recipes to give my mind a break. Well, truthfully I started looking up Russian pelmeni (they look so yummy!) and then got sidetracked. But I digress.

I realized that being both gluten and casein free is hard. Like, really hard. At least for me, because every recipe I know from my mom's cooking has butter or some kind of dairy. In fact, I'm finding being casein-free harder than going gluten-free. Now that I'm more familiar with baking and cooking with rice flour, I'm starting to get a handle on the addition of xanthan gum and other additives. I have a lot to learn, but I think with some experimentation I can convert wheat flour recipes to gluten-free. Plus, with this recipe I found for wonton wrappers, the pelmeni will be close behind! YAY!

However, what about my old friend butter? For most of the recipes that have required a solid lipid substance, coconut oil has been the prime candidate. However, I'm not sure if coconut oil would work exactly the same for things like toffee, and then there's the taste. There are some recipes that I can't imagine without the creamy, slightly salty taste of butter. Alright, so I won't make them. Or I could use a substitute like the casein-free ghee we found a while ago, but I'm still very skeptical.  Having butter without casein sounds to me like saying "It's snow, but without the frozen water crystals" or "It's Hitler, but without the genocide". It's so integral to how I perceive the object that I can't see how ghee could exist without the casein.

I'm mostly surprised because it suddenly hit me how many restrictions we have when looking for recipes. For instance, on the Gluten Free on a Shoestring website recipe page, especially the dessert section, there are so many recipes that still have butter or cornmeal. It just narrows the playing field a little more. However, there is an upside. This leaves room for experimentation. Maybe almond meal instead of cornmeal, or maybe we could find ways around using butter by taking the basic idea of the recipe but tweaking it a bit. You would have no idea how many recipes say they require butter but then only use it for caramelizing onions or a small amount of frying. We could always use oil, especially safflower oil, which tastes slightly buttery on its own.

Despite the fact that eating gluten/casein/soy/and corn free can get hard sometimes, we still have a bunch of recipes to work with. For instance, tonight we're having leftovers from the BEST SHEPARD'S PIE WE'VE MADE YET! I can't tell if it was the extra veggies, the garlic in the mashed potatoes, the tomato, or the half pound of bacon, but it's delicious. Personally, I think it was the bacon.

(image from here)

I'm a mutha' truckin' foodie!

It's been a long time since I last posted on this blog. Like, a really long time. I could blame school, or the fact that I haven't had too much to report as far as food labels go, or even my laziness. Maybe it's all of the above.

Going gluten/casein/corn/soy free has been both hard and easy. It's easy because my boyfriend and I have been experimenting with some really yummy recipes and adding twists to old ones. Seriously, adding cumin was the best idea for the good ol' standby of rice and beans. Plus, I lost a ton of weight. The process has been hard, however, because of the budget. We buy all of our fruits, veggies, and meat from the local farmer's market, which gets pretty pricey. But that's only half of it. The rest of our snack items as well as sundries like olive oil, salt, and spices either come from Whole Paycheck Foods or a local health food store. Each shopping trip tends to add up to about $70, and we usually need to stock up on snacks once a week or so. Things had to change.

Luckily, my boyfriend worked at a farm out here over the summer. We considered purchasing a CSA share from them, which would be a deal where we pay about $135 to cover the season and every week we pick up a load of veggies. However, since my boyfriend either planted, weeded, or harvested the veggies, the guys running it said we could get the food for free. SCORE!!!!!!! Plus, we're even closer to the farming community out here and we get invited to potlucks and potato feasts with them, which is always fun.

So how does this make me a foodie? Well, now that we have more veggies than we could every possibly afford on our own, this has freed up the food budget so we can go a little crazier with our meals. The result? This:

Acorn Squash stuffed with Lamb and Rice

1 cup rice
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 bell pepper-- cut into small chunks
2 medium carrots --cut into bite-sized pieces
1 lb cubed lamb meat or lamb leg steak cut into chunks
Olive oil
Garlic (about 3 cloves) minced
1 tsp rosemary
2 acorn squash
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Cook rice according to directions on package. When done, stir in cumin, chili powder, and bell pepper.

Coat a skillet or pan with olive oil and heat. Place in lamb meat, garlic, carrot, rosemary, salt and pepper. Brown lamb on all sides, but do not cook through completely. Spoon out the meat and carrot garlic mixture and mix into rice. Save the olive oil left in the pan.


Cut squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Place in a glass cooking dish or other pan which will hold the squash flesh-side up while cooking, Score the squash flesh or spear it with a fork. Pour olive oil left over from cooking the meat over the squash halves and season with salt and pepper to taste. Spoon meat and rice mixture into the hollow left from scooping out the seeds, making sure that each squash half has at least one or two chunks of meat (it's only fair!).

Place stuffed squash in oven and cook until squash flesh is tender and top layer of rice is slightly browned and crunchy. Enjoy!

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I had been thinking of cooking lamb with cumin rice for a while, however when we got the acorn squash from the farm, I needed to find a way to cook it. Plus I had  to find a way to get some of the carrots and pepper out of the fridge. Hence this recipe. I had watched my mom make stuffed peppers before, so I made an educated guess as to the oven temperature. I don't know the exact cooking time because squash cooks slower than peppers and I was also doing dishes at the time, and kept running back to the oven to check the tenderness of the squash. Basically, the squash was done when the dishes were done, but that's no accurate measure.

Also, all the measurements were approximated. Really, the only thing I measured was the rice. This gives some flexibility if you want to try the recipe yourself. If you want the rice hotter, add more chili powder (mmmm). If you want it less cumin-y, use less than a teaspoon or leave it out all together. You could also try this recipe with ground beef if you aren't a fan of lamb. If you don't want meat, I bet this would be tasty with some eggplant in lieu of meat!

Seriously, how many other college students are making lamb in their dorm? I bet none. Sorry I couldn't add any pictures, but the meal has been long since eaten and I couldn't pause to take a picture when I was so hungry!!